On a warm morning in May a few years ago, Edgar Valdez, a drug lord who goes by the nickname La Barbie, woke up in one of the houses he owned in the resort city of Acapulco. In the 1950s, this beautiful beach town was the premier haunt of American celebrities: Frank Sinatra used to […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
How Rajat Gupta Came Undone
The former head of McKinsey and a trusted consigliere to chief executives around the world, he was that rare businessman whose integrity was considered beyond reproach. Yet if the Securities and Exchange Commission is to be believed, just 11 days before his daughter’s wedding celebration, Gupta had done something virtually no one who knew him […]
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Too Young to Wed: The Secret World of Child Brides
Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows.
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Welcome to the Firm
On Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, and the state of the British monarchy. “Only churls will do anything other than look indulgently on their happiness. But since 1981 we should all have learnt much that eluded Diana and Cinderella. Being a princess is no fairytale; it may not even involve love. It is assumed […]
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The Obamas’ Marriage
On Oct. 3, just a day after their failed Olympics bid in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by and posted on the Web looked […]
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The Rude Warrior
The Rude Warrior At the time of Mel Gibson’s July 2006 arrest for driving under the influence, he had just come back from shooting Apocalypto in Mexico, where he’d apparently started drinking again. According to one source, his first reaction when he was pulled over (before going off on the Jews), never reported in the […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney
Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron […]
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The Rude Warrior
The Rude Warrior At the time of Mel Gibson’s July 2006 arrest for driving under the influence, he had just come back from shooting Apocalypto in Mexico, where he’d apparently started drinking again. According to one source, his first reaction when he was pulled over (before going off on the Jews), never reported in the […]
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Ross Andersen: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Ross Andersen is freelancer living in Washington, D.C. He has recently written about technology for The Atlantic, and is now working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He can also be found on Twitter at @andersen. *** “The Mother of Possibility,” by Sven Birkerts, Lapham’s Quarterly Procrastination being my favorite vice […]
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When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation: The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer […]
