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What George Clooney Smells Like, According to Tom Junod

“He is fifty-two years old. He is wearing a black hoodie zipped to the neck, blue jeans, and boots laced so assertively they squeak when he flexes his ankles. He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip. Everything is to scale with him. Many people have long eyelashes; he has lashes as long on the bottom as they are on the top. His eyes look like they’ve been caught by Venus flytraps. He is going gray, yes, but if you took a population sample of his hair, there is no doubt that any analysis would reveal that the numbers of black and gray hairs are evenly distributed and have achieved equipoise. He has recently showered, and a careful modicum of product lifts his hair off his forehead. He has surprisingly fine hands. He smells like soap.”

Tom Junod, describing George Clooney in a new Esquire profile. Read more from Junod.

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Photo: botheredbybees, Flickr

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The Decades-Long Quest for a Malaria Vaccine

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“Hoffman rolled up his sleeve and pressed the container—mesh side down—to the inside of his forearm. He felt a tickling sensation as the mosquitoes pricked his skin. Five minutes later, he removed the canister; an Army scientist examined the mosquitoes to confirm that each had sucked Hoffman’s blood. Five other volunteers did the same.

“For the next several days, Hoffman and the other volunteers bit their nails and hoped the vaccine would keep them healthy. (Those who come down with the disease are given drugs to kill the parasites.) By day ten, three volunteers were sick, but Hoffman and two others felt fine. Excitement began to swell; no injected malaria vaccine had come close to 50-percent protection—and this was its very first trial. ‘We thought we were going to win the Nobel Prize,’ Hoffman says.”

– In the Washingtonian, Luke Mullins profiles Dr. Stephen Hoffman, who has been trying to develop a malaria vaccine for the last 30 years. He hasn’t given up. Read more about vaccines.

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Photo by: NIAID

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‘He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip’

Longreads Pick

Tom Junod’s profile of George Clooney, in which the actor takes on Russell Crowe, Tesla and Leonardo DiCaprio:

"And the thing about playing Leo is you have all these guys talking shit. We get there, and there’s this guy, Danny A I think his name is. Danny A is this club kid from New York. And he comes up to me and says, ‘We played once at Chelsea Piers. I kicked your ass.’ I said, ‘I’ve only played at Chelsea Piers once in my life and ran the table. So if we played, you didn’t kick anybody’s ass.’ And so then we’re watching them warm up, and they’re doing this weave around the court, and one of the guys I play with says, ‘You know we’re going to kill these guys, right?’ Because they can’t play at all. We’re all like fifty years old, and we beat them three straight: 11–0, 11–0, 11–0. And the discrepancy between their game and how they talked about their game made me think of how important it is to have someone in your life to tell you what’s what. I’m not sure if Leo has someone like that.”

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 12, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,061 words)

The Anatomy of a Tweet

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“For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, ‘withheld_copyright,’ if set to ‘true,’ lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The ‘withheld_in_countries’ field can provide a list of the nations in which the tweet is banned. Another field has a telling name: ‘possibly_sensitive.’ It’s set to either true or false. The field indicates whether a tweet links to potentially offensive things such as ‘nudity, violence, or medical procedures.’ (If ever you wanted a snapshot of our world’s anxieties in three terms, there you have it.) As a user you can check a box on your profile so that the media you link to is automatically flagged this way. If you don’t, you risk having your pictures of your medical procedure marked as objectionable by an offended reader and thus put ‘in review,’ the Twitter version of limbo.”

Paul Ford, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the metadata of a tweet and what makes Twitter work. Read more from Ford.

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Cover via Richard Turley

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Street Cop

Longreads Pick

A profile of Mary Jo White, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who is making a name for herself as a tough enforcer. But when it comes to regulating, can White keep Wall Street in check?:

As the country sank into a severe recession, many wondered why the major figures in the financial world, whose firms had received billions of taxpayer dollars at the height of the crisis, weren’t being punished for their misdeeds. Because the S.E.C.—unlike the Treasury or the Federal Reserve—is an enforcement agency, it became the focus of the frustration. It was publicly humiliated when, in 2009, and again in 2011, a federal judge in New York, Jed Rakoff, tartly rejected its proposed settlements in fraud investigations of Bank of America and Citigroup. The Bank of America settlement, Rakoff wrote, “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality.” Rakoff’s Citigroup opinion concluded with a flourish: “In much of the world, propaganda reigns, and truth is confined to secretive, fearful whispers. Even in our nation, apologists for suppressing or obscuring the truth may always be found. But the S.E.C., of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this Court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances.” As one person who worked in the S.E.C.’s enforcement division put it when I spoke to him, “Judge Rakoff was wagging a finger at the S.E.C.” He raised his middle finger.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 4, 2013
Length: 40 minutes (10,236 words)

Him and Her

Longreads Pick

A Longreads Guest Pick from Rebecca Hiscott, a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable:

“I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and an eye into the making of Her, the quasi-sci-fi movie that aspires to be ‘a cautionary meditation on romance and technology’ and ‘a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love.’ The narrative follows Jonze through the process of writing, shooting and editing the film, and his subsequent efforts to correct a cinematic gamble that hasn’t paid off. Harris’s lush prose mimics Jonze’s aesthetic as a filmmaker, which the author describes as ‘disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places”; the article also has an evocative opening scene that perfectly captures the spirit of the film and its enigmatic director.”

Published: Oct 6, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,477 words)

“Somehow Anthony is blaming me and my 8,000-word story for the fact that everything turned to shit for him. I wish I knew if there was a word for all this. There’s probably a German word for it. And maybe I am naïve, but I am telling you that when you spend so many hours with somebody, you really do feel like you get a sense of who they are, and you make decisions based on that.”

A look inside the making of (and fallout from) a magazine profile, featuring Anthony Weiner, the New York Times Magazine and GQ.

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“In America, the economic fortunes of ordinary people like those in Ramsey’s audience are stagnating, while the fruits of increased productivity and profits are accruing to the wealthiest among us, including Ramsey himself, at an accelerating rate. But Ramsey seems to think that concern over inequality just comes down to bitterness. ‘This idea that it is all going to be fair—it’s a message Satan is using in our land right now: People who are wealthy must have done something bad,’ he said in his Sunday sermon in Houston. ‘It’s the spirit of poverty.’ He went on: ‘If you are living in a spirit of poverty, any car that is nicer than yours is too nice.’”

– Helaine Olen profiles personal finance guru Dave Ramsey who may or may not be saving America with his advice, depending on whom you talk to. See more stories from Pacific Standard.

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The Prophet

Longreads Pick

A profile of personal finance guru Dave Ramsey, who has six million listeners tune into his radio program and countless others who rely on him for tips about handling money. But Ramsey’s tips can only help people get so far:

Often it’s even more basic expenses that create the undertow. “The structural stuff swamps them in the end,” says Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a visiting professor of sociology at Arkansas State University who is studying Ramsey’s work. “One person I spoke with said they were doing well ’til their health insurance bill went up by $100 a month, or $1,200 a year. The first year they didn’t go on vacation. But the second year there was no more vacation to not go on.”

Economic volatility is an overwhelming fact for millions of Americans; willpower is finite; and gazelle intensity takes its toll. “Ramsey never talks about the cost of [his strategies],” Barrett-Fox continues. “He does not have good advice for people who have low incomes and are against the wall. If they lose a job, he doesn’t really have anything for those folks.”

Published: Oct 28, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,849 words)

Jay Z Has the Room

Longreads Pick

A profile of hip hop star Jay Z, who discusses his newly formed sports management venture and dispels rumors about his personal life:

“During our talk at Jungle studios, Jay said the sports agency ‘just evolved. All the athletes came through New York, came to the 40/40; we’d give them advice and we’d put them with great people. I was like, Where are your agents? And—this is a real quote—one of those guys said to me, “I haven’t seen my agent since I signed my contract, seven years ago.” Or a guy’s mother says she’s never even met the agent. In some cases they go through the family, but then again, it’s like: go through the family, charm the mother, tell her stuff … get him a car, and then … gone. Actually hoping to get fired so they can collect on the contract. This attitude that if you do one thing well you can’t do something else well is paralyzing for some people—but not for me. If people think that I only make music, they’re underestimating me. I’ve been a successful businessman my whole career. I can do more than one thing at one time. I can walk and chew gum.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 14, 2013
Length: 30 minutes (7,519 words)