Search Results for: atlantic
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[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
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Photo: Wikipedia
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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
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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.
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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
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Brendan I. Koerner's All-Time Favorite #Longreads
Brendan I. Koerner’s All-Time Favorite #Longreads
tetw:
As chosen by Brendan I. Koerner
A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan I. Koerner:
The Hunger Warriors by Scott Anderson – The story of Turkish women starving themselves to death for the most head-scratching of causes. Behold the sinister power of peer pressure.
Does a Sugar Bear Bite? by Lynn Hirschberg – A classic profile of Suge Knight at the zenith of his power. Maybe the best intro scene of any celebrity profile in history.
Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood by Evan Wright – Rob Capps, my editor at Wired, turned me onto Wright’s work. This is my personal favorite—a portrait of a man blessed with bottomless energy and ambition, though only the smallest trace of empathy for his fellow man.
Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser – A master class in narrative contrarianism. Deeply and elegantly reported, with a real human tragedy at its core.
A Bad Trip by Gary McLain (though doubtlessly ghostwritten by someone else) – Something I read as a boy, and which made me want to become a writer. Tough to have a better lead than this: “I was standing in the Rose Garden, wired on cocaine.” It gets better and more harrowing from there.
A Better Brew by Burkhard Bilger – Perhaps the best story ever by one of my favorite writers. (His piece on cockfighting from several years back is a classic, too.) Bilger does a tremendous job of creating real tension, while never losing sight of his primary duty as an explainer of business and science.
And a few you’ll need a subscription to read:
Rock is Dead by David Samuels – This is what it felt like to be young in the ’90s. A terrifying portrait of morality adrift in a sea of excess.
Gangland by Jon Lee Anderson – There is no more badass reporter working in journalism today. No one else could have set up an interview with the most violent (yet complex) gangster in all of Rio’s slums. Truly intrepid reporting.
What Young Men Do by Richard Lloyd Parry and “Eating Glass” by Alfred Lawrie (both from Granta 62) – I’m a huge Granta fan, and this is my fave issue of all time because it contains these two non-fiction classics. The Lawrie one, in particular, is a doozy—a seemingly lighthearted profile that goes to deep, dark places as it progresses.
After Welfare” by Katherine Boo – The story that got me into Boo’s now much-heralded work. Still haunted by the scene of the two kids eating ramen and boiled eggs.
For more from the man himself head over to his blog or sign up for updates via Twitter.
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Featured: E.’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Deadspin, plus more.
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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.

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