Search Results for: The Atlantic

[Not single-page] From the 2012 James Beard Award nominations: A profile of Sam Mogannam, who transformed his tiny family grocery store, San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, into one the most influential stores in the country: 

When Mogannam was 15 years old, the market was owned by his father and uncle. The Mission district hadn’t yet been discovered by a generation of tattooed 25-year-olds happy to stand in line for a $3 latte. Just up the street, Mission Dolores Park was popular with unemployed men who spent their days drinking fortified wine, some of which they bought at Bi-Rite. Though he was not yet old enough to drink, in 1983 Mogannam asked his father if he could remerchandise the wine department. He got rid of the Night Train Express, MD 20/20, and Ripple, and on the advice of the store’s wine reps brought in their strongest sellers—Sebastiani, Robert Mondavi, and Beaulieu Vineyard. The drunks found someplace else to shop, and Bi-Rite’s wine sales soared.

“Cornering the Market.” — Emily Kaiser Thelin, San Francisco Magazine

See also: “The Great Grocery Smackdown.” — Corby Kummer, The Atlantic, March 1, 2010

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, The Atlantic, The Texas Observer, n+1, Guernica, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Marcus Sortijas.

Photo: Wikipedia

How did a blackjack player manage to win $15 million from Atlantic City casinos over the course of several months?

As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.

He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold.

“The Man Who Broke Atlantic City.” — Mark Bowden, The Atlantic

See also: “The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High.” — Jay Caspian Kang, The Morning News, Oct. 8, 2010

Featured: Marcus Sortijas, writer, editor and WordPress specialist. See his story picks from The Atlantic, The San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, plus more on his #longreads page.

The story of Dan Marlowe, a pulp writer who suffered from amnesia, befriended an ex-con, and later inspired writers like Stephen King:

Physicians thought the amnesia was psychosomatic, brought on by stress and money troubles, but there were hints of physical problems too. Before his brain emptied out, Marlowe had been laid low by crushing migraines, and there was evidence he’d had similar problems during his youth. In time, Marlowe would tell people the memory loss resulted from a stroke, and the symptoms he described (weakness on his left side, for instance) seemed to bear that out.

In any case, his creative-writing ability vanished, and his life fast-reversed 20 years. He was trapped in a noir plot eerily similar to that of Never Live Twice, the 1964 Marlowe thriller in which amnesia blanks out the mind of government operative Jackrabbit Smith, who has to fight his way back to his old life, blasting bad guys and spanking a woman psychologist along the way.

“The Wrong Marlowe.” — Charles Kelly, Los Angeles Review of Books

See also: “Writers in Hollywood.” — Raymond Chandler, The Atlantic, Nov. 1, 1945

Featured Longreader: Author Danyel Smith. See her story picks from Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, Esquire, plus more on her longreads page.

Featured: E.’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Deadspin, plus more.

Featured: Journalist and globetrotter Ana Lopez. See her story picks from The New York Times’s Pam Belluck, The Atlantic’s James Fallows, The Guardian, plus more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Tyler Gleason, student, intrepid explorer and politics enthusiast. See his story picks from The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, plus more on his #longreads page.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Salon, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Nature, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Emily Keeler.