When Irish Eyes Are Crying The Irish nouveau riche may have created a Ponzi scheme, but it was a Ponzi scheme in which they themselves believed. So too for that matter did some large number of ordinary Irish citizens, who bought houses for fantastic sums. Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest […]
Tag: longreads
Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court This is how science progresses: One researcher comes up with a hypothesis, which others question and test. But shaken-baby cases are haunted by the enormous repercussions of getting it wrong — the conviction of innocent adults, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger to children […]
Why Isn’t Mike Vanderjagt Still Kicking In The NFL? Some might think the answer comes down to two phrases: “idiot kicker” and “liquored up.” These four words were famously uttered in one sentence at the Pro Bowl in 2003 by Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. You remember: Vanderjagt had gone on Canadian TV and said he […]
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code Mohan Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, […]
Anonymous Was a Woman I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf wrote those words about the entire realm of literary creation, not about that special subset of it called “quotations”—the minting of concise snippets so […]
Gary Francione, Animal Advocate “We all condemn Michael Vick for sitting around a pit and watching dogs fight because he derives pleasure from doing so. The rest of us sit around the barbecue pit and roast the bodies of animals who have been tortured as badly as—if not worse than—Vick’s fighting dogs, because we enjoy […]
The Great Afghan Bank Heist Poring over stacks of documents, investigators at the American Embassy in Kabul have pinpointed dozens of instances in which Kabul Bank executives may have bribed Afghan officials, including a successful bid to hold the contract to process the salaries that the government pays its employees each month—approximately seventy-five million dollars. […]
Why Reality Shows Failed on Russian TV For the Russian version of “The Apprentice,” Vladimir Potanin, a metals oligarch worth more than $10 billion, was recruited to be the boss choosing between the candidates competing for the dream job. Potanin goaded, teased and tortured the candidates as they went through increasingly difficult challenges. The show […]
Show the Monster: Guillermo del Toro’s Quest To Get Amazing Creatures Onscreen The size of the collection was disconcerting; it was as if the 40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget. Del Toro owned more than five thousand comic books and several puppets of Nosferatu. On a shelf, a posed plastic figurine of […]
Steven Slater’s Landing When an irate female passenger cursed him out after their plane arrived at JFK, the then-38-year-old JetBlue flight attendant with twenty years in the flying business grabbed two cans of beer off the beverage cart, activated the emergency-escape chute, and promptly exited the aircraft, his job, and much of his former life. […]
I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait Have you ever been caught in a lie? Or caught stealing or speeding or cheating? Maybe you’ve known the impossible weight of the hand on your shoulder, the blinding twirl of the lights in your rearview mirror, the razor-sharp voice of your teacher or wife. Maybe you’ve felt […]
The Wave-Maker: On Big Wave Surfer Ken Bradshaw [Mark] Foo said, “But, no, no, this is really it, isn’t it? Just two guys in the water. Fifteen- to 18-foot swells. Perfect waves. No sections. This is as good as it gets.” Bradshaw said, “Yes, Mark. This is what it’s about.” A light came on in […]
Dealing with Julian Assange and the Secrets He Spilled Criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a […]
The Last Temptation of Ted Haggard What his wife’s book didn’t do was settle the question of Ted’s sexuality or give insight into how it plays out in their marriage now—whether Ted still battles the same urges that got him to Mike Jones’s massage table. And if so, does he tell her when it happens? […]
Body Snatchers About the same time that Rose Oprea was hospitalized for her stroke, the 62nd precinct of the New York City police department, in Brooklyn, was notified of a possible case of fraud. A couple — Deborah Johnson and her husband, Robert Nelms — had recently purchased the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home. […]
In Norway, Startups Say Ja to Socialism Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo’s position develop a retching distaste for paying taxes, Dalmo doesn’t mind them much. “The tax system is good—it’s fair,” he tells me. “What we’re doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the question isn’t how you pay for the […]
Robbing from the Poor (Writer) “Robin Hood” opens a year late, with a Tomatometer rating of 44% and it is not expected to unseat “Iron Man 2” as #1 film over the weekend. Oh, and they disliked it at Cannes. Oh, and the budget is rumored to be $250 million and maybe even more. Would […]
Travis the Menace Virtually everyone made light of the escapade downtown. The state Department of Environmental Protection was aware of what happened, and also that the Herolds were in violation of a new statute that required a permit to keep a primate over 50 pounds. But they determined that pressing any action would amount to […]
Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from […]
Meet the Foreskin Restoration Movement For Matt, the worst thing about his restoration adventure was the influence the people on the Internet had on him. When he told the story of his two re-circumcisions online, others in the community accused him of lying. “They said how evil circumcision is. Some said they hated their parents […]
jaredbkeller: I often find that urbanism and urban living are overly romanticized, more often by citydwellers themselves: Stumbling through concrete caravans dripping with mystique, a day-to-day narrative of tempered chaos, or an odd catharsis as told through the lens of sidewalk meet-cute. I often long for life closer to the wilderness, clogged by forests and dirty roads, but […]
Does Football Have a Future? The NFL and the Concussion Crisis “In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players,” the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu said. “I mean, with […]
maria bustillos: my #longreads #list : WikiLeaks dorkismo: Here is my entry for the #longreads #list: five essential things to read about WikiLeaks. Julian Assange’s 2006 essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracies as Governance”, which contextualize the author’s efforts better than any interview or article has yet done. 3,164 words:…
Back to the Future with Peter Thiel One important difference between the housing bubble and the education bubble is that there was sort of a class aspect to the housing bubble: upper-middle-class people in the U.S. tend to be invested in equities, and middle-class people tend to be invested in housing, so there was a […]
Forever 21’s Fast (and Loose) Fashion Empire How did the Changs, Korean immigrants who opened their first store in a gritty section of Los Angeles in 1984, become such important players in fast fashion? The family credits its accomplishments to hard work, faith, and frugality, though Forever 21 has not prospered without controversy. The company […]
Forty Years Later: How ‘Oregon Trail’ Was Born For the next two weeks, Dillenberger and Heinemann spent each night wedged into a tiny computer office—a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School—tapping code into a teletype machine. The teletype was a screen-less, electromechanical typewriter connected via telephone to a mainframe computer that could issue […]
Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (1994) PLAYBOY: What else is Microsoft involved in? We’ve heard about software that can control washing machines, for instance. GATES: [Laughs] The washing machine example is extreme, but people do sometimes kid us that we see an opportunity to sell our software in broad areas. We are involved in a new […]
Return of the Hit Man Cradling a cosmopolitan in his plump right hand, Don Kirshner is reminiscing about his former life as a pop-music mogul and getting a little wistful. All the hits, all the bands, all the favors he did for up-and-comers. But here he sits, at the best table in this swanky restaurant, […]
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