On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident: An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a […]
The New Yorker
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Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next: In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then […]
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Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate: The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had […]
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A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process: One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President […]
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[Fiction] A young boy plays with the truth as he skips school one day: Your stepfather walks toward you. He takes your chin in his thumb and forefinger, and turns your face back and forth, as though it were a piece of merchandise he was thinking about buying. “You must have fallen pretty easy,” he […]
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Google and YouTube exec Robert Kyncl’s plans for the future of web TV—and the company’s big bet on professional content: “Kyncl’s relationships in Hollywood would help in securing premium content; and, more important, he understood entertainment culture. He brought ‘the skill set of being able to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood—an information culture and an […]
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[Fiction] A couple, and a writing workshop: Her third story started out funny. It was about a woman who gave birth to a cat. The hero of the story was the husband, who suspected that the cat wasn’t his. A fat ginger tomcat that slept on the lid of the dumpster right below the window […]
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“We all knew there was no hope for anything to get better in North Korea,’’ she told me. “Sometimes we’d say, ‘Hey, if we crossed the river we’d be in China, but there are too many soldiers.’ ’’ Song-hee also knew that, if she crossed the border, she could be picked up by the Chinese […]
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When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed […]
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“Dear Residents of Tivoli Garden,” the don had written. “I hope you are all fine and this letter reaches everyone in the best of health. As for me I’m doing all right and my health conditions are fine.” Coke thanked Tivoli for sending him postcards and said he was sorry for the pain of the […]