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Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week, Andrea Pitzer examines Susan Orlean’s “Orchid Fever,” which was originally published in The New Yorker on Jan. 23, 1995.

Orlean builds her study of obsession out of a vocabulary of desire and devastation, ranging from the apocalyptic to the sexually charged. Laroche’s own “passions boil up quickly and end abruptly, like tornadoes.” In the Fakahatchee, the rocks have crevices, the trees have crotches, and the orchids invite erotic speculation. Mere friction is enough to ignite the grass, literally setting cars on fire, leaving behind “pan-fried tourists” and the carcasses of burned-out Model Ts.

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 31: Susan Orlean Maps Obsession

The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up:

I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.” That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.

It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.

He looked around. One man got up and left. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.

“What Makes a Perfect Spy Tick?” — Jeff Stein, Washington Post

See also: “The Journalist and the Spies.” — Dexter Filkins, New Yorker, Sept. 19, 2011

How one night at Rupert Murdoch’s London townhouse changed the course of the phone-hacking scandal:

Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the family media empire; Rebekah Brooks, the chief­executive of News Corp.’s U.K. unit; and Chase Carey, the New York-based president and chief operating officer. Joining the executives were a pair of legal heavyweights: Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, and Brendan Sullivan Jr., the well-connected Washington lawyer brought into the Murdoch fold at Klein’s request.

It was May 19, 2011. The senior Murdoch had flown in two days earlier for a whirlwind of meetings with his top London executives. He had called the dinner party to hash out once and for all how to handle the phone-hacking scandal that had been hanging over the company for months and was suddenly spinning out of control.

“Dinner at Rupert’s.” — Greg Farrell, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Hack Work.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, Aug. 1, 2011

In the 1940s, U.S. doctors led experiments that intentionally infected thousands of Guatemalans with venereal diseases. A closer look at how it happened, and who knew:

John Cutler, the young investigator who led the Guatemalan experiments, had the full backing of US health officials, including the surgeon general.

“Cutler thought that what he was doing was really important, and he wasn’t some lone gunman,” says Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, whose discovery of Cutler’s unpublished reports on the experiments led to the public disclosure of the research.

“Human Experiments: First, Do Harm.” — Matthew Walter, Nature

See also: “A Deadly Misdiagnosis: Is it Possible to Save the Millions of People who Die from TB?” — Michael Specter, The New Yorker, Nov. 8. 2010

The early days of robots. The Age of Enlightenment inspired inventors like Jacques de Vaucanson to create ever more realistic machines that mimicked human behavior:

Vaucanson, however, was less a philosophical theorist than a practical, even greedy businessman. In 1739, as profits from the Flute Player’s performances began to decline, he added two new automatons to his exhibit. One was a pipe-and-drum player. The other—which was to make him, for a time, one of the most famous men in Europe—was a mechanical duck.

And not merely a wind-up duck that flapped its wings and quacked and turned its head. If you held out a bit of food in your palm, the duck’s head would lower, its beak would fall open, and the automaton would actually gulp down the morsel. And then, some minutes later—Reader, I am not making this up—the duck would excrete it.

“Man as Machine.” — Max Byrd, Wilson Quarterly

See also: “Robots That Care.” — Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 2009

Photo: Joost/Flickr

Featured Longreader: Sarah Zhang’s #Longreads page. See her story picks from the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Slate.com, plus more.

On making a move from the City to the South. Steven Boone and other New Yorkers have headed to Warner Robins, Georgia:

Like so many young black parents, she moved south not just to provide her children with a more secure environment but also to escape the punishing New York rents. In Warner Robins, entire homes in quiet areas rent for less than a single room in Bed Stuy. Townhouses on well-kept complexes, complete with pool and 24-hour gym access, go for as little as $450 a month and rarely higher than $850. In Macon, the college town next door (and geographically the true dead center of Georgia), gorgeous historic homes rent for as low as $400 a month and often no more than $650. (The local rumor is that, as lovely as the homes are, the ghosts in them insure frequent turnaround. Cool.)

This new wave of African-Americans heading south has been called the Second Great Migration or the Reverse Migration, in contrast to last century’s black exodus from a segregated, hostile South to opportunities in the North.

“A Reverse Migration from Post-Crack New York.” — Steven Boone, Capital New York

See also: “The Uprooted.” — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2010

Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:

That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. “Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: ‘You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.’”

“Three Trials for Murder.” — Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker (Nov.14, 2011)

See more #longreads from Nicholas Schmidle

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, a #fiction pick, plus a guest pick from @Kaisertalk.

Photo: shinya/Flickr

A Minnesota school district enacts a policy designed to stop teachers from discussing or acknowledging homosexuality. Gay students report bullying, but administrators do nothing. The result is a string of suicides that has shaken the community:

Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a ‘suicide cluster,’ adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. “Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time,” explains Reidenberg. “Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life.”

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied.

“One Town’s War on Gay Teens.” — Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

See also: “The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker