Search Results for: The New Yorker

[Fiction, 2012 Pen/O. Henry Winner] A son recalls an exiled life with his father, mother, and a maid:

At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.

‘Baba, who are you looking for?’ I once asked.

He shook his head and said, ‘No one.’

But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for.

“Naima.” — Hisham Matar, The New Yorker (2011)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, This Land Press, The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, a fiction pick from Five Chapters, plus a guest pick from Ester Bloom.

A story of love and revolution in Cuba. William Morgan was a free-spirited American drawn to Cuba to help Castro fight, only to grow disenchanted with his embrace of communism:

One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, “She knows how to use it.”

Her name was Olga Rodríguez.

The Yankee Comandante — David Grann, The New Yorker

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Guernica, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Village Voice, and Mother Jones, plus fiction from Joyland and a guest pick from writer John Fram.

How the Supreme Court dismantled campaign-finance reform—and how government missteps in the Citizens United case inadvertently aided in its undoing:

Alito wanted to push Stewart down a slippery slope. Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of ‘electronic communications’ shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? ‘Do you think the Constitution required Congress to draw the line where it did, limiting this to broadcast and cable and so forth?’ Alito said. Could the law limit a corporation from ‘providing the same thing in a book? Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all those as well?’

Yes, Stewart said: ‘Those could have been applied to additional media as well.’

The Justices leaned forward.

“Money Unlimited.” — Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

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[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends:

Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading the same magazine he had been reading. He stood in the middle of the room and raised his hands. ‘Where are they?’

‘If there’s one thing that’s predictable,’ she said.

‘But it’s almost forty-five minutes.’

‘They’ll be eating some very cold appetizers.’

“The Dinner Party.” — Joshua Ferris, The New Yorker, 2008

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Monthly, #fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Amy Whipple.

Meet the researchers who are developing new methods for countering global warming using geoengineering. Some solutions come with great risks:

While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower the temperature of the earth, at relatively little expense—most estimates put the cost at less than ten billion dollars a year. But it would do nothing to halt ocean acidification, which threatens to destroy coral reefs and wipe out an enormous number of aquatic species. The risks of reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the atmosphere on that scale would be as obvious—and immediate—as the benefits. If such a program were suddenly to fall apart, the earth would be subjected to extremely rapid warming, with nothing to stop it. And while such an effort would cool the globe, it might do so in ways that disrupt the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, which provide the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food.

“The Climate Fixers.” — Michael Specter, The New Yorker

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, The Classical, New York Magazine, #fiction from Guernica, plus a guest pick from Largehearted Boy’s David Gutowski.

How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec:

That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding the part of the system that he could manipulate into doing what he wanted. Hotz focussed on the ‘hypervisor,’ powerful software that controls what programs run on the machine.

To reach the hypervisor, he had to get past two chips called the Cell and the Cell Memory. He knew how he was going to scramble them: by connecting a wire to the memory and shooting it with pulses of voltage, just as he had when he hacked his iPhone.

“Machine Politics.” — David Kushner, The New Yorker

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