The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)
posted by Trurl
on Jan 24, 2012 -
102 comments
How
Dropbox said "No" to Steve Jobs and lived happily ever after. (So far.)
posted by Trurl
on Oct 24, 2011 -
110 comments
In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson's ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON. (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Oct 6, 2011 -
26 comments
The Survivor. "When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on? ... Why does one man come undone while the next finds a way to make it through?" [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 2, 2011 -
60 comments
The Madoff Tapes "One evening, my home phone rang. “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,” a recording announced. And there he was." [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 28, 2011 -
30 comments
The Dancer and the Terrorist. When Peru’s most wanted man,
Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, was captured in 1992, a young ballerina,
Maritza Garrido Lecca, went to jail
too, for harbouring him at her studio. The story was turned into a
novel and
film, “
The Dancer Upstairs” (
trailer). This year, the author of the novel,
Nicholas Shakespeare, flew to Lima to meet the dancer at last — and to ask her whether she was guilty.
posted by zarq
on Jan 20, 2011 -
13 comments
The Dubai Job: One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see. Ronen Bergman reveals the intricate, chilling details of the mission and investigates how Israel's vaunted spy agency did things so spectacularly wrong
(previously)
posted by allkindsoftime
on Jan 5, 2011 -
73 comments
"
Voice of San Diego reporter Adrian Florido set out to find a family,
he writes, "whose experience could illustrate
the day-to-day challenge for Burmese refugees" in San Diego, since "more than 200 Burmese families have arrived [in that city] since 2006." In the process, Florido met a 24-year-old man named Har Sin" who was unable to hear, speak, read, write or use sign language, and wound up writing a two-part story about him:
In a New Land, Hoping to Hear and
Breaking Free of a Life Without Language.
The story is available as a downloadable pdf: A Silent Journey Series. / Via The Kicker, the daily blog of the Columbia Journalism Review [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 13, 2010 -
5 comments
"
Places like Picher are why Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980—better known as the Superfund bill." - Wired Magazine on the most toxic town in America,
Picher, OK , and
the people who still live there
posted by The Whelk
on Sep 5, 2010 -
21 comments
Because they have their own minor-league spelling bee circuit. Having a qualifying spelling bee league that is, at times, tougher than the actual competition is what results in the extreme over-representation of Indian kids (1% in population, 11% in the spelling bee) at the national-level Scripps spelling bee. Where else have you seen such a phenomenon?
posted by vidur
on Jun 2, 2010 -
15 comments
"But no people. That’s the dream here. And that’s why nobody faces the pretty durn obvious fact that after the apocalypse, alliances, partnerships, gangs, whatever you want to call them, are going to be tighter, stricter, more important than ever. Because that’s no fun" The Omega Nerd: The
War Nerd talks about survival porn, water, Mormons, and Mongols.
posted by The Whelk
on Mar 12, 2009 -
25 comments
Where can a company that owns nothing but legal documents force another company that actually does make products to pay them?
In the USA! You too can be a patent troll. Just patent any dumb idea you have -- you'll certainly be awarded the patent -- then sue anyone who makes a product that looks remotely like it could be based on your idea. Congratulations! You made money by
punishing people who actually make things! Hooray!
posted by raaka
on Jan 23, 2006 -
22 comments
Community Values, Corporate Profit and Pornography "Popular culture isn't popular because members of the "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show" (to borrow a line from a campaign ad this year) are the only customers. It's because there is an unquenched thirst for it, and the corporate profiteers (who are members of and contributors to both political parties) see a nationwide market for it." What will we tell the children?
posted by nofundy
on Dec 21, 2004 -
20 comments
Long, interesting article in the NYT Sunday Magazine (reg. req'd, apologies) about a putatively "underground" community of black men who have sex with other men and who do not self-identify as gay.
There's more than a few problems with the piece. The reportage has a kind of breathless/clueless tone to it - like when the author identifies the phrase "on the DL" as originating in a 1990's TLC song (!) - and a pseudoanthropological,
National Geographic stink of imputed Otherness hangs over the whole enterprise, but I found it compelling anyway.
If nothing else, it's an introduction to a
entire new subculture I had always assumed the existence of, but never seen. (I particularly liked the NYT piece's excursion to a low-rent thug-life amateur pr0n operation. Gibson was right: the street does indeed find its own uses for technology.)
posted by adamgreenfield
on Aug 1, 2003 -
54 comments
George Bush's Article in NYTIMES. I was surprised to see an article by the prez on nytimes.com. We are used to presidents communicating through TV- but there the speech is picked up by all major channels in that case. It seems odd to see a sitting president use
one newspaper to put forward a viewpoint. Perhaps, Al Gore's articles in the same space spurred dubya. Oh, by the way, what did you think of the story? Is this the work of a speechwriter or do you think it is genuine? Did everyone notice the absence of the word Iraq in this article?
(The customary apology for the nytimes post applies. I believe you can still register as metafilter, metafilter.)
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy
on Sep 11, 2002 -
36 comments
