longreads

The Man Who Wouldn’t Die: Meet Olympian and Biggest Loser Contestant Rulon Gardner Ru left a message on Grant’s machine. “Hey, brotha,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hey, I just wanted you to know that we crashed into Lake Powell yesterday, and we swam two miles and huddled up like puppies through the night, and we survived. […]

Europe’s Odd Couple zeketurner: That is when she had to face Sarkozy. “She’s a scientist, almost like a German cliché, planning everything, going step by step, unemotional, not a show horse,” Stefan Kornelius, a senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, told me. “But Sarkozy’s the kind of macho man that she doesn’t like at all. […]

Gram Junkies: In Transportation Design the Key Issue Is Not Speed, but Weight Transport economist Chris Bradshaw wants planners and designers to respect what he calls “the scalar hierarchy.” This is when trips taken most frequently are short enough to be made by walking (even if pulling a small cart), while the next more frequent […]

Transcript: President Obama’s Address in Tucson I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power? Dahm’s vision, however, suggests another “Terminator scenario,” one more plausible and not without menace. Over the course of dozens of interviews with military officials, robot designers and technology ethicists, I came to understand that we are at work on not one but two […]

Night-Shifting For the Hip Fleet Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-50-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teen-agers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not too bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. But a year later the cab stories at Dover sound just […]

The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved with Euros The advantages of a single European currency were obvious. No more need to change money when you arrived in another country; no more uncertainty on the part of importers about what a contract would actually end up costing or on the part of exporters about what […]