Syllabi

Olympic Reads

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 11:14:00 -0400

Sarah Lyall had a lovely essay on navigating the Olympic park in yesterday’s Times:

The park is a city unto itself, with the feel of an instant, pop-up sportscape, a grand but almost generic place. It feels as if it could be anywhere or nowhere, a great temporary community whose positioning outside one of the world’s most idiosyncratic cities is almost immaterial. Sure, the prevailing accents are British, and some of the restaurants sell fish and chips, and everyone loves Team GB, but the Olympic park barely feels like part of London or even part of Britain.

Jeré Longman also has a piece in the Times (today’s, I think, but it’s been online for a few days) on Lolo Jones that’s notable for how unerringly cruel it is. I didn’t know you could roll like that, NYT. Deadspin also has a good breakdown of the piece.

Still, Jones has received far greater publicity than any other American track and field athlete competing in the London Games. This was based not on achievement but on her exotic beauty and on a sad and cynical marketing campaign. Essentially, Jones has decided she will be whatever anyone wants her to be — vixen, virgin, victim — to draw attention to herself and the many products she endorses.

Steve Myers wrote about the photographer that caught that remarkable shot of Gabby Douglas’s winning beam routine (that also has a really cute editor’s note):

He wasn’t sure he had gotten the shot, though. Because he photographed the entire competition, he didn’t have time to look at anything. He put the card in his laptop, sent the images to an editor, and kept shooting. Only later did he realize that he had nailed it.

Scott Staton has a short history of strange controversies in marathons to accompany an excellent (subscription-only) New Yorker feature on a dentist alleged to have cheated repeatedly in marathons:

The original Olympic course retraced the route from Marathon to Athens along rough country roads. Of seventeen runners, twelve were Greek and eight failed to finish. To the host city, it meant the world that the winner of this first official marathon, Spiridon Louis, was “a child of the soil.” Another Greek runner followed and was awarded silver. When Spiridon Belokas came next, he completed an improbable Greek medal sweep and was rapturously received by the crowd. But the fourth place finisher, from Hungary, contested the result, charging that Belokas had covered part of the course in a carriage. This was true; Greek elation mingled with disgrace. Belokas lost his medal, but won the distinction of being the first person ever disqualified for cheating in a marathon.

Katie Baker for Grantland wrote a light but comprehensive history of trampoline is an Olympic sport (with a delightful number of links within):

Nissen was both restless and a consummate showman, two traits that helped explain some of his more notorious marketing stunts. In 1960, he rented a kangaroo and was photographed bouncing alongside it in Central Park. (The shot, which took nearly a week to get right, ended up in Sports Illustrated.) In 1977, he smuggled the components of a bespoke four-by-eight-foot trampoline to the top of the Giza pyramid in Egypt, assembled it, and bounced away. Back down at the bottom, he “found several Egyptian police along with the director of Egyptian antiquities waiting,” his daughter Dagmar wrote in a book about her dad. He had interests outside of the trampoline too: Nissen held more than 40 patents (including one for something named the “Bunsaver Air Cushion”) and in the ’70s owned a women’s professional basketball team called the Iowa Cornets.

Olympic Reads

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 13:55:53 -0400

Rob Trucks interviewed Nancy Hogshead-Makar about the moment she knew her career was over:

One of the hard parts when people talk about quitting is just that it feels so good to be that masterful at something, to be at the very top of the game, and to—I mean, I still, to this day, I’m 50 years old, I get in the water and I feel masterful. I feel like I can grab hold of the water, I can move the water. I move confidently and gracefully in the water. This is clearly where God meant for me to be. And then to go try to start from scratch at anything else is tough.

Sarah Rich on the history of the olympic pictograms:

Of all the instances in which graphic communication is necessary to transcend language barriers, the Olympic Games are, if not the most important, probably the most visible. We take the little icons of swimmers and sprinters as a given aspect of Olympic design, but the pictograms were a mid-20th Century invention—first employed, in fact, the last time London hosted the games, in 1948 (some pictographic gestures were made at the 1936 Berlin games, though their mark on international memory has been permitted to fade because of their association with Third Reich ideology).

Dvora Meyers on NBC’s stupid gymnastics coverage:

As we’ve noted, NBC didn’t show the floor routine of Ksenia Afanasyeva, the defending world champion on the apparatus, who crashed to her knees on her final tumbling pass—the moment that basically sealed the American women’s first team gold medal in 16 years. Showing Russians unhappy and in tears is one of NBC’s favorite pastimes, but seeing Afanasyeva stumble would’ve eliminated any sort of faux suspense that remained after Anastasia Grishina’s enormous error.

How to Build a Subway

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 08:32:00 -0400

New York has been trying to put another subway on the east side of New York for over 80 years. First World War II got in the way, then looming bankruptcy in 1975. Today, 2nd Avenue has been transformed by permanent construction, blocked crosswalks, and the occasional rumbling of underground explosions. The parade of giant, noisy machines was a fun curiosity for about ten seconds, but I’m more interested in what’s happening underground.

Village Voice obliged in April with a great feature on the “sandhogs” working underground all day to finish the tunnel:

The history of the New York City sandhogs dates back to the 1870s and the sinking of the caissons for the Brooklyn Bridge. Local 147 was formed some 30 years later, in 1906, and has been integral to every subterranean public-works project since. Subways, car and water tunnels, sewers—you name it, they’ve dug it. Yet in all that time, the sandhogs have never experienced a bonanza of work such as that of the past few years. Along with the Second Avenue subway, there is the East Side Access project, which will connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal; the westward extension of the 7 train; City Water Tunnel No. 3 and the Croton Filtration Plant; the renovated South Ferry station; and the new Fulton Street Transit Center in Downtown Brooklyn. In the weeks just prior to 9/11, only 12 of Local 147’s roughly 600 members had work. Today, the union is around 2,000 strong, with well more than half enjoying consistent employment throughout the recent boom.

Now The Times has a short piece on the construction, with some great details and anecdotes about the process of drilling 22-foot-wide tunnels under New York:

Current technology permits a subtler approach: workers chiseled a launch box at 96th Street and in it assembled a tunnel-boring machine, a mechanical worm with a 130-ton head full of whirling steel discs. The discs chewed two 22-foot-wide tunnels at a depth of 80-feet — enough to slide below water, gas, and electric mains, connect to the station at 63rd and keep the incline of the track always below 3 percent, the steepest grade trains can reliably climb. Beforehand, to test the stability of the ground, engineers took two-inch-wide borings every 1,000 feet, from the street to below the floor of the planned tunnel. In the middle of 92nd, they discovered a challenge: soil and crumbly rock underpinning the city that, if jostled, could cause quaking above. “If we settle the ground in a cornfield it doesn’t really matter,” Mukherjee says. “Here if I settle the ground, I collapse the buildings.” To firm up the site, contractors drilled eight-inch-wide, 80-foot-deep holes and inserted steel pipes. Into those pipes they pumped a constant stream of calcium-chloride brine chilled to minus-13 degrees. In 10 weeks, the earth was frozen solid, and they could cut and brace the tunnel so it would support the surrounding sediment after the ground thawed.

Olympic Reads

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:51:00 -0400

Eric Freeman on NBC’s approach to broadcasting the Olympics, and what it says about NBC:

“The broadcast is athletic competition communicated with an unheard-of level of editorial control, in which stars are picked before the games begin, sports are prized for their ability to produce narrative, and performance comes secondary to what people can say about it.”

The myths and legends surrounding Usain Bolt (see also: Luke Dittrich’s profile of Bolt):

“Few would deny that Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world — but even fewer could say why. While his fans are happy to call him a miracle, the man himself is lost in a cloud of legends, hype and marketing.”

Adam Elder for Wired on the technological advances in timing that Omega brings to the Olympics:

“The Games are as much a showcase for Omega as they are for the athletes, a chance for the Swiss watchmakers to show off the latest advances in sports timing technology — including a clock accurate to one-millionth of a second.”

The Best Watchdog Journalism on Campaign Finance

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:07:34 -0400

The Best Watchdog Journalism on Campaign Finance:

ProPublica has rounded up some of the best stories on campaign finance:

This week, we’re exposing the world of campaign finance post-Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that opened the door to super PACs. The stories fall into three categories: donor profiles, super PACs and scandals, though as Michael Kinsley said: “The scandal in Washington isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what’s legal.”

Among the best is the New Yorker’s profile of the Koch brothers and The New Republic’s recent story on Harold Simmons, the 2012 campaign’s biggest donor, but you should browse the full list.

If you’re into this sort of thing (who isn’t, right?), your next stop will be ProPublica’s MuckReads page, their curation of watchdog reporting, which also has a Twitter hashtag.

David Kushner

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:13:36 -0400

David Kushner’s been busy: three stories in about as many weeks, all fantastic reads.

Undercover Anarchist (Rolling Stone)

What happens when a cop falls in love with the radicals he’s spying on? Mark Kennedy found out the hard way.

The Man Who Hacked Hollywood (GQ)

They’ve become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities (your Scarletts, your Milas) stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They’re also the center of an entire stealth industry. For the man recently arrested in the biggest case yet, hacking also gave him access to a trove of Hollywood’s seamiest secrets—who was sleeping together, who was closeted, who liked to sext. What the snoop didn’t realize was that he was being watched, too.

Machine Politics

The man who started the hacker wars.

When you’re done these, Kushner’s entire output since 2003 is reprinted in full on his website (with no pagination!).

Behind The Scenes

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:03:45 -0400

The methods of identifying a killer are as numerous as the methods of killing a person, but how reliable are they really?

The Guardian published a great breakdown of what goes on at a crime scene last week. Using a crime scene from 2001, where a bag containing the dismembered corpse of a 31 year old woman was found at the bottom of a canal, as a case study, we get quotes from all the main players on the scene: the crime scene manager, the police diver, the forensic specialist, the detective, and the documents examiner, who has one particularly impressive tool in their arsenal:

There is the Electrostatic Detection Apparatus – you put a document on it and it produces a vacuum, drawing the document down. We put what I would liken to clingfilm over the top and run an electric bar over it, which charges it – the indented impressions will be a different charge. Over this we pour glass beads with a carbon-based powder on them. The powder sticks and reveals the indented impression: words appear, images appear. It’s like magic. What you then see is often some sort of malicious communication – perhaps a threat sent to the prime minister. Something has emerged out of nothing.

The Guardian also went behind the scenes at LGC Forensics, Britain’s biggest supplier of outsourced forensic science services, earlier this year. LGC employees, they tell us, helped find the evidence used to convict numerous high profile murderers, including those of Damilola Taylor, Milly Dowler, and Stephen Lawrence.

Because the thing about DNA evidence, strong as it is, large as it looms in the public’s imagination, is that it connects a human and an object. It doesn’t prove when the two came into contact. Nor does it necessarily prove they were actually in direct contact at all.

“It’s not just the finding of the evidence,” says Ros Hammond, a senior scientific adviser who has worked on many high-profile cases. “It’s how did it get there, and can we rule out any other way it did so? And what does it mean?”

One technique that’s been used to answer those questions is criminal profiling. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the advent of criminal profiling for the New Yorker in 2007. The technique was born in the 1970s:

Douglas and Ressler wanted to know whether there was a pattern that connected a killer’s life and personality with the nature of his crimes. They were looking for what psychologists would call a homology, an agreement between character and action, and, after comparing what they learned from the killers with what they already knew about the characteristics of their murders, they became convinced that they’d found one.

Serial killers, they concluded, fall into one of two categories. Some crime scenes show evidence of logic and planning. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfill a specific fantasy. The recruitment of the victim might involve a ruse or a con. The perpetrator maintains control throughout the offense. He takes his time with the victim, carefully enacting his fantasies. He is adaptable and mobile. He almost never leaves a weapon behind. He meticulously conceals the body. Douglas and Ressler, in their respective books, call that kind of crime “organized.”

Profiling enjoyed a great reputation for years, especially on TV shows, but it’s seen some controversy. Anecdotes abound in Gladwell’s story of false convictions and astonishing leaps of judgment, and the science behind it may not even be particularly solid:

Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur”—that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the F.B.I.’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,” told me, “The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.”

These days, forensic testing is a safer bet in securing a conviction and good ratings for your crime drama, but it’s not without its flaws. Texas Monthly reported on Keith Pikett, the “master of the dog-scent lineup,” last year. Pikett helped identify more than one thousand suspects using his scent test, and various other states have used the test, but there’s very little science confirming its efficacy. Moreover, Pikett had no forensic training, and his techniques turned out to be fairly primitive.

The truth is, police and prosecutors have been using questionable forensic techniques for years, things involving bite marks, blood-spatter patterns, and even ear and lip prints. They use them because they help solve crimes. But over the past decade we’ve begun to understand just how unscientific forensic science can be. In the lab and at the crime scene, unsound techniques have incriminated the wrong person time and again. The most visible evidence of this is the 252 DNA exonerations nationwide since 1989—many of which, according to the Innocence Project, involved some form of improper or faulty forensic science. And these exonerees were the ones whose stories had happy endings, saved by DNA taken from old crime-scene samples that had not been discarded; no one knows how many unlucky people convicted on faulty science still languish in prison.

If the Innocence Project sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve been cleaning up the mess of wrongful convictions for years. It came out just this year that the Innocence Project has evidence exonerating dozens of men in Virginia alone using DNA tests (which the state is desperately trying to keep under wraps), and you can look to Texas for even more tales of exoneration due to faulty evidence.

There’s also a sort of corollary to this overreliance on techniques we don’t really understand and have barely tested. It’s called The CSI Effect:

Bernard Knight, formerly one of Britain’s chief pathologists, said that because of television crime dramas, jurors today expect more categorical proof than forensic science is capable of delivering.

Hopefully the inspiration for the name is obvious.

The uncontested kingpin of unreliable convictions, though, is the lie detector:

The county prosecutors offered Buzz a deal: they would drop all charges if he agreed to take a polygraph – a lie detector test – to prove his innocence. Convinced the whole episode was one big mistake, Buzz readily agreed. He took two tests but both suggested he was lying about his innocence. This, along with circumstantial evidence, sealed his 1979 conviction and he spent two-and-a-half years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

During his time in prison, Buzz studied the polygraph. He sent his results to a number of experts but received wildly different interpretations. Determined to show the test was fallible, he developed a training exercise to help people fool the lie detector and after just 15 minutes of instruction, 23 out of 27 inmates beat the polygraph. Buzz was eventually exonerated, helped by the testimony of the real killer’s mother, and his case has become one of the most notorious episodes in the history of the technology.

If you agree to a lie detector test, you might as well seal your own confession, but even the simple act of confession can be unreliable:

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. What on earth could be the motive? To stop the abuse? To curry favor with the interrogator? To follow some fragile thread of imaginary hope that cooperation will bring freedom?

Here are some more stories that go behind the crime scene.

If CSI turned everybody into forensic scientists, then Lie to Me made everybody an expert on reading micro-expressions. Surprisingly, though, the science is pretty good. I don’t know how widely this is applied to crimes, but apparently there’s a lot to learn from Mike Daisey.
Wildlife investigators at Yellowstone used some of the same crime scene techniques we use for human crimes to catch a killer grizzly bear last year.
The Monster of Florence is the name given to the person or persons behind a series of Italian murders in the 60s and 80s. Arrests have been made, but most people think the real killers were never identified. The investigation began with a “spectacularly incompetent” crime scene examination.
In The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox, Nathaniel Rich recounts the Amanda Knox case that consumed the media for months. She was coerced into giving a false confession to a crime she may not even have been a suspect in but for incompetent Italian police trampling all over the crime scene.

National Magazine Awards 2012 Finalists

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:27:15 -0400

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the National Magazine Awards finalists for 2012 today, one of the highest awards in the magazine industry. Below are some of the articles and essays receiving awards that are available online. The full list of winners is available here.

Essays and Criticism

Nine Words For "Recursion"

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:52:00 -0400

In a paper co-written by Noam Chomsky in 2002, its authors claim recursion is the only “uniquely human component of the faculty of language.” Imagine Chomsky’s surprise, then, when linguist Daniel Everett published a paper 3 years later claiming to have found an Amazonian tribe whose language exhibited no sign of recursion, along with various other features appearing to go some way to disproving Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar. Everett’s findings are far from conclusive and difficult to verify, and accordingly, the scholarly debate has been furious.

The Interpreter, John Colapinto
Chomsky, the Pirahã, and turduckens of the Amazon, Daniel Harbour
Angry Words, Tom Bartlett
How Do You Say ‘Disagreement’ in Pirahã?, Jennifer Schuessler
The Rise and Fall of a Venomous Dispute, Geoffrey Pullum
Squabble, Mark Liberman
The Grammar of Happiness: An Interview with Daniel Everett, Avi Solomon

Prose and Cons

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:16:00 -0400

Revisiting the misdeeds of journalists in the wake of Mike Daisey.

Mike Daisey recently found himself the latest in a long line of journalists facing scorn for plagiarising or fabricating parts of their reporting, leading This American Life to air a retraction of an episode where Daisey told his story.

Mike Daisey’s problems began, as they usually do in these cases, with details that didn’t ring true to those more knowledgable. Rob Schmitz’s suspicions led him to Daisey’s translator in China, whose memory of the trip had significant deviations from Daisey’s. Missing were the N-hexane poison victims, the underage workers, guards with guns, and various other elements.

The Media on Daisey

This American Life’s retraction episode revealed the depths of Daisey’s deception with more clarity. Daisey was audibly cowed by the revelation of his deceit, but stood convincingly by his conviction that he did it for theater. His mistake, he claimed, was allowing TAL to air it as journalism. The transcript of Daisey’s original episode on TAL is still online, but by now the details hardly matter, as Daisey continues to claim exemption from journalistic integrity in pursuit of exposing a story. A string of journalists and media commentators have contributed to the discussion, and the picture they paint is one of near universal distrust. The problem for Daisey is that his story hadn’t actually done a great deal to focus attention on the Foxconn workers. His show has been a critical success, but most of the discussion cites The New York Times’s investigation led by Charles Duhigg (who Ira Glass spoke to on TAL’s retraction episode).

Daisey is only the most recent, and surely not the last, victim of being caught lying. Behind him lie the remains of many journalists’ careers. Here, a look at some of the most high profile public perjurers.

Jayson Blair

In The New York Times’s own words, the Jayson Blair affair was “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.” Blair joined the NYT as an intern in 1998 but needed to graduate before accepting an extended position. He returned in 1999 and eventually became an “intermediate reporter,” while everybody assumed he had graduated. Which he had not. Between then and 2003, Blair plagiarised and lied in a series of New York Times articles, a scandal so big that, when it all unraveled, The Times published a 7,300 word frontpage story about it.

Although the feature focuses mainly on interactions at The Times, there is also the suggestion that the scandal could have been averted had his journalism school, the University of Maryland, been more vigilant in recognizing problems waiting to happen. Maryland staff have largely rejected that claim, but an investigation by David Folkenflik in the Baltimore Sun found a history of erratic behaviour and skirting the rules.

Judith Miller

“It was precisely her unpleasant aggressiveness that helped force the story—the marriage of WMD and global jihadists—closer to the top of the agenda.”

After Blair, The Times had Judith Miller to contend with. In the run up to the Iraq War, Miller provided the paper with numerous scoops about Saddam Hussein’s capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, mostly sourced from Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi politician, almost all of which have proven to be inaccurate. Franklin Foer’s profile of Miller for New York Magazine tells the story at length, starting with Miller’s fearsome reputation in the newsroom.

Janet Cooke

In 1981, Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for her article in the Washington Post, a profile of an 8-year old heroin addict. Even then, there were doubts about the story, but it was submitted anyway. Two days after the prize was awarded, the Post admitted the story was false and Cooke had to return the prize. The paper’s ombudsman at the time, David Maraniss, published a full account of how the story made it to print in the paper shortly after.

Stephen Glass

“He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.”

Stephen Glass started at The New Republic in 1995 as an editorial assistant and was writing feature articles as the associate editor by 1998. During those three years, he fabricated sources, quotes, and even entire events. Loyalty from the TNR staff helped him get away with it for longer than he might have, but constant rebuttals from the sources of his articles reduced his credibility as far as it could go. Glass’s jig was brought to an end when a reporter wondering how he got scooped by Glass revealed problems with one of Glass’s stories. From there, Glass’s story unravelled like string.In one of his best pieces, Buzz Bissinger retraces the Stephen Glass affair for Vanity Fair (it was also adapted for a film), weaving original research into a gripping narrative.

Stephen Glass has come back to the public eye recently: he wants to practice law, and the California Committee of Bar Examiners would rather he didn’t. Jack Shafer, writing for Reuters in December, outlined Glass’s battle to get accepted on the bar. Glass passed the bar exam in New York in 2000, but was told by the bar that he’d probably not be approved on character grounds. So he tried again in California, successfully passing the bar exam there in 2007. Glass has been battling the California committee ever since. Glass appealed the decision, which was then overturned in 2010, only for the committee to appeal the decision, which was overturned again. Again, the committee appealed, this time to the California Supreme Court. The details, drawn mostly from court documents, are slightly murky and very fascinating.

Jack Kelley

Jack Kelley was something of a legend at USA Today. He’d been with the paper 10 years and had filed over 700 stories from all over the globe. But after vetting his output, a team assigned to the matter at USA Today found “sweeping and substantial” inconsistencies.

On the same day USA Today revealed its findings, Jill Rosen painted a fuller picture of the deception in the American Journalism Review, finding a man who many thought they knew well, “the last person they’d suspect in a lie.”

Jay Forman

In 2001, Jay Forman wrote an article for Slate about “monkeyfishing,” a practice apparently taking place in the Florida Keys where fishermen bait their hooks with apples and catch rhesus monkeys, dragging them into the water. When the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times called the piece a work of fiction, Forman backtracked and admitted to fabricating parts of the stories, but maintained that the trip to the island had happened. It took six years for Forman to come clean and admit to fabricating the entire thing.

James Frey

Not surprisingly, given the ostensibly autobiographical nature of Mike Daisey’s story, he’s most frequently been compared to James Frey. In 2006, The Smoking Gun published the results of an investigation into Frey’s latest memoir, A Million Little Lies, finding numerous discrepancies in his accounts of his drug abuse and criminal record. (Oprah initially defended Frey, but later eviscerated him on her show.) Like Daisey, he defended himself as long as he could, until the lies became too heavy to hold up.

David Sedaris

Also from the realm of the memoirists is David Sedaris. Although Sedaris enjoys a significantly better reputation than anybody else on this list, even he’s not immune to the scourge of the fact checkers. When Alex Heard looked into Sedaris’s output he found a number of discrepancies in his stories and wondered what exactly it means to be a nonfiction humorist.

Related: The Way We Plagiarise Now

Diamonds in the Rough

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:14:00 -0400

Looking at the tumultuous, profitable world of diamonds. A worldwide cartel controls supply and demand while labs try to mass-produce diamonds, squabbling between shareholders guts a successful jewelers, and the heist of the century that remains unsolved.

Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

Edward Jay Epstein’s classic 1982 piece on the De Beers cartel. At its height, De Beers was one of the most successful cartels in the history of commerce. It controlled or owned all the diamond mines in South Africa, diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, holland and Switzerland, and was so in control of the price of diamonds that even speculators began buying them to guard against inflation and recession.

When diamond prices collapsed during the Depression, De Beers created an advertising campaign to instill the sentiment that diamonds are forever. By painting diamonds as intrinsic parts of courtship and marriage, they ensured their owners would be less willing to sell them, stabilizing the diamond market.

The Trouble with Harry Winston

The story of Harry Winston, once one of the most successful jewelers in the world, its diamond-buying power rivaling even De Beers. Its finances and reputation were left in tatters by the brothers Ron and Bruce Winston following a squabble that lasted over ten years.

When Harry Winston, the company’s founder, died in 1978, he left control of the company to Ron, but equal shares of the company’s proceeds to both brothers. Bruce filed suits in 1990 and 1992 claiming his salary had remained the same while Ron’s gradually increased over the previous ten years, and that he had mismanaged the firm and taken advantage of his financial naïveté. The ongoing squabble and growing army of lawyers reduced the company’s worth to a third of what it once was, what jeweler Bernard Hammerman calls “one of the big heartaches of the business.”

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist

Six years ago a team of thieves got into the Antwerp Diamond Center, passing 10 layers of security, and stole more than $100 million of loose diamonds, gold, and jewelery. It was called the heist of the century; the loot was never discovered and even now authorities don’t know for sure how they did it.

Leonardo Notabartolo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his suspected involvement in the heist. He’s denied involvement and refused to talk to journalists for six years. Until now. “I am going to tell you a true story,” he tells Joshua Davis.

The New Diamond Age

People have been trying to manufacture diamonds since the mid-19th century, and there are now two startups producing gem-quality diamonds. The sudden arrival of mass-produced diamonds could alter the public’s perception of diamonds and transform the diamond market. It also opens the door to diamond-based semiconductors, that could handle much faster speeds than silicon.

De Beers’ reaction to these startups was to set up the Gem Defensive Programme, a campaign warning jewelers and the public about manufactured diamonds and supplying gem labs with machines that can tell the difference between man-made and natural.

My Roommate, The Diamond Thief

When Brian Boucher finds folders full of his mail and personal information in his troublesome tenant’s room, he suspects a scam. The truth was worse: his tenant was Dino Smith, a wanted jewel thief on the lam.

Diamonds Are Forever in Botswana

The discovery of a huge diamond mine in Botswana by De Beers has been a huge catalyst in Botswana’s economic growth. Unlike most companies that have exploited Africa’s growth, De Beers entered a 50/50 venture with the government and sold them a 15 percent stake in the company. Largely thanks to the discovery of diamonds, Botswana is now one of the most prosperous countries in Africa.

(Image via Flickr)

Julian Assange and Wikileaks

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:47:57 -0500

Wikileaks has been making news since 2006, but in 2010 they made big news with a series of leaks starting with the “Collateral Murder” videos. Following that were the Afghan war logs and the Iraq war logs. Wikileaks’ final leak that year was the diplomatic cables, the largest leak of classified documents in history. As the leaks and the events surrounding them unfolded, Wikileaks became one of the biggest, most thrilling stories in years.

Getting to Know Wikileaks

Julian Assange, the group’s leader, became a high profile figure in the media, as a source on the leaks and as a spokesman for open governance.

No Secrets

Raffi Khatchadourian wrote this excellent, extensive profile of Julian Assange while “Collateral Murder,” his first major media coup, was in production and still a closely-guarded secret.

An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

Andy Greenberg spoke to Assange at the end of 2010 in a wide-ranging interview covering recent and future leaks, Wikileaks’ future, and what Assange’s overarching goals are.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview

Rolling Stone published another in-depth interview with Assange in 2012 while he was waiting for a hearing to see if he’d be extradited to Sweden for questioning on his alleged molestation of two women in August 2010. They spoke about his arrest warrant, his time in solitary, and the future of journalism.

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy

An excellent analysis of the Wikileaks ideology and some of Assange’s pre-Wikileaks writing, by Aaron Bady.

The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks

A more contrarian take on Wikileaks. Jared Lanier thinks a world without secrets would cause a breakdown of democracy and trust.

Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

“The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.”

Wikileaks’ Relationship With The Media

Assange’s shadowy reputation and the circumstances of the leaks ultimately overshadowed the leaks themselves. In releasing most of its cache of classified documents, Wikileaks partnered with media establishments to help disseminate, analyse and report on their contents. This unprecedented collaboration proved to eventful and endlessly fascinating.

The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs

The Afghanistan logs were the first to be released through the media, with the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian simultaneously publishing selections of the documents with their respective analysis. In this article, Clint Hendler explains how it all came together.

Dealing With Assange and the Wikileaks Secrets

Here Bill Keller recounts the media collaboration end to end, from his view as the New York Times executive editor. The Times’ relationship with Wikileaks soured when they declined to link to the Iraq war logs on the Wikileaks site, fearing it could put informants in danger.

WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety

This critical profile of Assange that The Times published alongside their Iraq War Logs coverage severed their ties completely.

An Inside Look at Difficult Negotiations with Julian Assange

With The Times’ relationship with Wikileaks collapsing, Assange wanted to exclude The Times from his next leak, the diplomatic cables. Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark represented Der Spiegel during these meetings, and here they relay the encounters from their position.

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

Vanity Fair also published a detailed, birds-eye view of the newspapers’ relationship with Assange.

Bradley Manning

The source of the leaks, allegedly, was Bradley Manning, an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. When Manning found out he was about to be discharged for punching a female intelligence analyst, he’s said to have contacted Adrian Lamo, a former hacker, claiming to be in possession of classified documents that he wanted to leak. Lamo went to the FBI, and Manning was arrested.

Bradley Manning is at the center of the WikiLeaks controversy. But who is he?

The Washington Post published a long profile of Manning and his involvement in the leaks leading up to his arrest, painting a picture of an emotional but promising young man.

Bradley Manning’s Army of One

New York Magazine also published a profile of Manning, calling him “one of America’s most unusual revolutionaries.”

Private Manning And The Making Of Wikileaks

Another profile of Manning, by Denver Nicks.

(Image via Vanity Fair)

Who's Watching You?

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:29:52 -0500

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads”

— Jeff Hammerbacher

Brick and mortar retailers like Target have been tracking you for years, rapidly improving their statistical methods to make educated guesses about how to advertise at you more effectively, but as the internet becomes more and more ubiquitous the practice is moving online and getting bigger than ever.

Almost all of your favourite companies are gathering data on your surfing habits in a massive interconnected web of ad trackers. The primary goal is to serve more effective advertising, but these companies now hold enough data on you to bring privacy concerns to the fore. A Wall Street Journal investigation a year and a half ago found a burgeoning industry with millions of dollars flowing through it holding detailed records on you, making increasingly precise predictions about your behaviour, and a recent investigation by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic takes a philosophical look at your anonymity among the machines.

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

The New York Times’ reporting on how companies like Target track your shopping habits and try to capitalise on periods in people’s lives where their routines are in flux and their brand priorities are up for grabs.

The Web’s Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only

The Wall Street Journal’s 2010 investigation into online advertising companies. They don’t have your name, but they can make educated guesses about almost every other aspect of your personality.

I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web

Alexis Madrigal’s voyage into the business of ad trackers. Millions of dollars flow through these companies, and though their methods raise new questions about privacy, he argues that the health of the internet relies on them.

Advertising and the health of the internet

Rob Horning disagrees with Madrigal’s argument. “One might argue that the fact that it seems as though we can’t have an internet not fueled by advertising is a sign that the internet is already unhealthy, sick unto death.”

Look Who’s Following You on the Internet

Veronique Greenwood spent a day online with Collusion, a tool that records who’s tracking you online. By the end of the day, almost every website she visited was connected by a vast web of ad trackers.

(Image via The Atlantic)

America's Warehouses

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:51:59 -0500

What happens when you buy something online? Your order finds its way to a worker in a warehouse on a 7:30am to 5pm shift who finds the item somewhere in a cavernous warehouse and scans it. Thousands of times a day. They risk termination if they don’t meet impossible targets, if they take a day off for a doctor visit, even if they injure themselves. They have almost no worker’s rights or benefits. And they make about $11 an hour.

The warehouses are owned by third party logistics companies, and they staff the warehouses using temping agencies that supply thousands of warehouse workers. Sometimes they’re supplying so many that they even have offices right there in the warehouse. By operating this way, big name retailers like Amazon and Walmart distance themselves from the conditions in the warehouses. They’re rarely named in the frequent lawsuits, and they can easily shift responsibility.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave

Mac McClelland went undercover recently at one of these warehouses, serving an unnamed online retailer. The company running the warehouse estimates its workers walk 12 miles a day chasing impossible targets and negligible pay.

A Visit to the Warehouse of Soul-Crushing Sadness

Prior to the previous reporting, Mac McClelland went undercover at another warehouse in Ohio where workers were forbidden from even speaking on their shift.

The New Blue Collar: Temporary Work, Lasting Poverty And The American Warehouse

Huffington Post published this expose on Walmart’s warehouses last year. Workers there — “lumpers” — shifted boxes, some as heavy as 200 lbs, to and from trailers all day long. If there isn’t enough work to go around they’re simply sent home without pay, and they were only given two 15-minute breaks on a shift.

Inside Amazon’s Warehouse

A report from last year on one of Amazon’s warehouses, where temperatures soar so high there are sometimes ambulances waiting to treat dehydrated workers. If they didn’t get well enough to return, they were replaced.

In the Wake of Protest: One Woman’s Attempt to Unionize Amazon

Vanessa Veselka, a former anti-WTO activist, got a job as a stock picker at an Amazon warehouse with the sole purpose of unionizing it.

Have you read anything good about America’s warehouses? Email me or let me know on Twitter.

(Image via The Atlantic)

Think Again: Cyberwar

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:06:00 -0500

Think Again: Cyberwar:

With the advent of viruses like Stuxnet, cyberwarfare is upon us according to Businessweek and a string of other commentators. Thomas Rid for Foreign Policy disagrees, arguing that it’s all hype. So far, any cyberwarfare we’ve seen doesn’t fit the description of an act of war.

The promise of Teletext

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:06:00 -0500

The promise of Teletext:

Jim Romenesko shared an article from the University of Alabama student newspaper in 1977 about Teletext, one of the earliest technological advances to concern newspaper execs: “If we think of newspapers as being the printed object that is delivered to our homes we may be talking about replacing newspapers with an electronic signal.”

Reading The Oscars

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:39:00 -0500

The 84th Academy Awards happened last night. If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen a fairly shameful percentage of the nominated films, so here’s a guide to some good reads about the Oscars and the stars of this year’s awards to help you get acquainted.

Oscar Night in Hollywood

Raymond Chandler on the Oscars in 1948.

But in the motion picture we possess an art medium whose glories are not all behind us. It has already produced great work, and if, comparatively and proportionately, far too little of that great work has been achieved in Hollywood, I think that is all the more reason why in its annual tribal dance of the stars and the big-shot producers Hollywood should contrive a little quiet awareness of the fact. Of course it won’t. I’m just daydreaming.

A Golden Age of Foreign Films, Mostly Unseen

On the Academy Awards’ odd, arbitrary rules for inclusion in the foreign films category.

The True Story Of The Oscar Streaker

David Niven was interrupted at the 46th Academy Awards by Robert Opel streaking across the stage behind him, but Opel was so much more than a streaker.

Robbed at the Oscars

A little background on how the Oscar winners are selected. Nobody should feel “robbed” by what is simply a popularity contest.

A nobody’s guide to the Oscars

Neil Gaiman on being invisible at the Oscars in 2010. His film, Coraline, had no chance of winning Best Animated Picture against Up.

The Nominees

The Artists

The Artist left David Denby dreaming of the lost style of actors like Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks in the heyday of silent movies.

Palm Tree of Life

Elbert Ventura disagrees with critics who dismiss The Descendants as undeserving of scrutiny.

The Vision Thing

Fast Company profiled Scorsese as Hugo was hitting theatres. Even after making 22 movies, and the freedom to make whatever he wants, he still feels the pressure of never having had a major box office hit.

I’ve Seen Every Woody Allen Movie

Juliet Lapidos watched every Woody Allen movie prior to Midnight in Paris. Here’s what she learned.

The Trading Desk

Michael Lewis’s 2003 New York Times article on Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s that Moneyball is based on.

A Small Movie Unveils Big Truths About Wall Street

Margin Call definitely isn’t a documentary, but it says a lot about the societal costs of high finance and the embrace of personal corruption.

David Fincher Gets The Girl

W Magazine profiled David Fincher on the set of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. He distinguishes between his work as films (Fight Club and Zodiac), conceived for the public and filmmakers, and movies (The Social Network) as overtly commercial.

How to Build the Pixar of the iPad Age in Shreveport, Louisiana

A profile of Moonbot Studios, winners of the best animated short for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

Have you read anything good about the Oscars? email me or let me know on Twitter.

(Image via ABC)

Burn All the Liars

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:40:00 -0500

Burn All the Liars:

“An unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of the great golden-era stars, into a lobotomized zombie. The main trouble: Frances Farmer wasn’t lobotomized. An investigation to set one of Hollywood’s most convoluted stories straight.”

The Magic of Magic

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:38:00 -0500

The internet might be making it easy to spoil the pleasure of a great illusion, but greats like Ricky Jay and Penn and Teller will never be forgotten, and magic might yet have a few tricks to teach: neuroscientists are looking closely at what magic can tell us about the brain, and the CIA hired a magician to write a manual on soldier deception.

Wired in 2008 on the cognitive patterns that magic exploits and how scientists are using that knowledge to help understand the brain.
Jonah Lehrer wrote about Teller from Penn and Teller joining a group of illusionists recruited by researchers to look at the neuroscience of magic. The first paper from the group was published last year, with Teller as a coauthor.
More on neuroscience and magic from the Boston Globe.
New Scientist on the Gathering for Gardner, a convention uniting mathmeticians, magicians, and puzzle enthusiasts, held in honor of Martin Gardner, a journalist and amateur magician.
Magician Brian Brushwood shares a letter Teller sent him 14 years ago, sharing his secrets to starting a successful career in magic.
A pair of articles on the CIA’s MKULTRA program, when they hired magician John Mulholland to write a manual on deception that soldiers in the field could use.
A profile of Persi Diaconis, a statistics professor who learned about magic while touring with Dai Vernon and uses the knowledge to inspire some of his most innovative scholarly output.
Nice profile of Teller from Las Vegas Weekly.
Also from Las Vegas Weekly: “Is the Internet revolutionizing magic … or killing it?”
A wonderful profile of Ricky Jay, the greatest sleight-of-hand magician of all time, from the New Yorker in 2003.
A paper reviewing the scientific and magical literature on misdirection.
Teller writes in Smithsonian Magazine about how he manipulates people when performing magic.

What Neurology Can Tell Us About Human Nature

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:00 -0500

What Neurology Can Tell Us About Human Nature:

Here’s Vilayanur Ramachandran talking to Edge (video and text) about his team’s study of apotemnophilia, a neurological syndrome that’s roughly opposite to phantom limb syndrome, where an individual, apparently otherwise healthy, has an intense desire to have a limb amputated. If his name seems familiar, it’s because he’s also done a lot of research on synesthesia.

Syllabi

Olympic Reads

Olympic Reads

How to Build a Subway

Olympic Reads

The Best Watchdog Journalism on Campaign Finance

David Kushner

Behind The Scenes

National Magazine Awards 2012 Finalists

Public Interest

Direct Fail, 5280 Magazine

Tiny Little Laws, Harper’s Magazine

The Big Business of Breast Cancer, Marie Claire

The Invisible Army, The New Yorker

Reporting

Our Man in Kandahar, The Atlantic

What Happened To Mitrice Richardson?, Los Angeles Magazine

The Apostate, The New Yorker

Getting bin Laden, The New Yorker

Echoes from a Distant Battlefield, Vanity Fair

Feature Writing

Heavenly Father, Esquire

The Man Who Sailed His House, GQ

You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!, New York Times Magazine

A Murder Foretold, The New Yorker

Essays and Criticism

The Loading dock Manifesto, Esquire

Too Much Information, GQ

Paper Tigers, New York Magazine

The Stutterer, Slate

Nine Words For "Recursion"

The Interpreter, John Colapinto

Chomsky, the Pirahã, and turduckens of the Amazon, Daniel Harbour

Angry Words, Tom Bartlett

How Do You Say ‘Disagreement’ in Pirahã?, Jennifer Schuessler

The Rise and Fall of a Venomous Dispute, Geoffrey Pullum

Squabble, Mark Liberman

The Grammar of Happiness: An Interview with Daniel Everett, Avi Solomon

Prose and Cons

The Media on Daisey

Jayson Blair

Judith Miller

Janet Cooke

Stephen Glass

Jack Kelley

Jay Forman

James Frey

David Sedaris

Related: The Way We Plagiarise Now

Diamonds in the Rough

Julian Assange and Wikileaks

Getting to Know Wikileaks

Wikileaks’ Relationship With The Media

Bradley Manning

Who's Watching You?

America's Warehouses

Think Again: Cyberwar

The promise of Teletext

Reading The Oscars

The Nominees

Burn All the Liars

The Magic of Magic

What Neurology Can Tell Us About Human Nature