James L. Brooks on Journalism, the Oscars, and ‘Broadcast News’ We filmed it almost entirely in sequence. We even broke up the newsroom scenes just so we could shoot the picture in sequence. And that means we kept informing ourselves. That means we woke up and these things happened with people in the sequence they’re […]
Tag: longreads
The Madoff Tapes And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’ ” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She […]
Story’s End: Grief and Writing a Mother’s Death It was my mother who had long ago planted in me the habit of writing things down in order to understand them. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy-covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, puzzled. “What […]
Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat “Here’s a peek into my insanity,” Charlie Sheen tells me one afternoon in February. “People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from Apocalypse Now or Jaws.” It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the […]
motherjones: Inside the “lavish,” “debauched” lifestyle of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. Beyond the oil money, all-night parties, Playboy bunnies, and 15,000-square-foot Malibu mansion, there’s the larger question of whether Teodoro has used shell companies to funnel $100 million into the United States. Click here for deets and […]
Clayton Christensen: The Survivor Clayton I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn’t see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty. Matthew One time we visited my […]
USA Inc.: An Open Letter to Shareholders, by Mary Meeker What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, […]
The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson To a degree unique among the five major tribes in the South, the Cherokees used diplomacy and legal argument to protect their interests. With the help of a forward-looking warrior named Major Ridge, John Ross became the tribe’s primary negotiator with officials in Washington, D.C., adept at citing both federal […]
If She Did It No one expected Judith Regan to go quietly. After dropping out of sight for much of this year, on Nov. 13 she filed a lawsuit against News Corp, HarperCollins, and Jane Friedman for defamation, breach of contract, and sex discrimination. Most spectacularly, the lawsuit alleges that Ms. Regan was the victim […]
‘I’m Glad I Went to Prison’ He entered school with vague ambitions of returning to his previous career, that of a grinding forward in the NHL. Although he still would one day like to play professional hockey again, now his long-term goal is to earn a Ph.D. in psychology. His professors say that’s no pipe […]
Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators theatlantic: This is like something right out of “The Manchurian Candidate”: The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the […]
The Radical By day, Joseph Harris studied potential treatments for gastrointestinal cancer — work that invariably required the use of animal models. By night, he crusaded against such animal research, sabotaging companies with links to it. Within a month, Harris would be caught vandalizing another company. Ultimately, he would become the first person in the […]
Playboy Bunnies. $2 Million Bugattis. Meet the World’s Richest Minister of Agriculture Teodorin’s 68-year-old father, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, seized power of Equatorial Guinea in a 1979 coup and has made apparent his intent to hand over power to a chosen successor. Obiang has sired an unknown number of children with multiple women, […]
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 […]
Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?” One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the […]
The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard Today, I am still being jolted, and the jagged terrain behind bears the track marks of my own innumerable small humiliations. In the seventh grade: A substitute asks the class to read out loud, and when I stumble over my first sentence, she inquires of the other […]
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock ’99 After losing money on the first Woodstock sequel in 1994, Scher told reporters at Woodstock 99 that he was determined “to try and make a profit on this one.” Organizers were later criticized for charging $150 a ticket ($180 at […]
The People V. Football She had no idea, back then, that he was sick. She had no idea he was losing his mind. Something neurological, the doctors are now saying, some kind of sludge blocking pathways in his brain. Would it have made a difference if she knew? Of course it would have. But you […]
Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America “As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, […]
The Truth About Sex Addiction Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at […]
The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student I don’t usually bother telling people I went to Michigan for a single semester anymore. There isn’t much point because I’m at the age where people don’t give a shit where you went to school. They just ask you that question as a way of passing the […]
Taming the Wild Mavrik, the object of Trut’s attention, is about the size of a Shetland sheepdog, with chestnut orange fur and a white bib down his front. He plays his designated role in turn: wagging his tail, rolling on his back, panting eagerly in anticipation of attention. Trut reaches in and scoops him up, […]
The Day the Movies Died “Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on […]
Turks and Caicos: Caribbean Hangover The blue water is so clear you can count every reef, so still you can see the odd cloud reflected in it. Lucy and Jeff have agreed to offer a view from the sky of what wary developers wrought on the ground: shuttered private-island resorts and abandoned luxury hotels marring […]
The One-Man Political Machine On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, […]
Tabloid Takedown The John Edwards tale began, like so many National Enquirer investigations, with a phone call. When the tip line rang in the paper’s Santa Monica office, reporters often raced to answer it. Rick Egusquiza grabbed it late one afternoon in fall 2007, knowing full well that nine out of 10 calls were worthless, […]
Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail? Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write […]
Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still […]
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