“All The Dirt That’s Fit To Print” by Alex Pappademas (June 2010)
We’re used to National Enquirer stories on “shocking” plastic surgery, but in 2010 the rage almost won a Pulitzer. Alex Pappademas chronicles its evolution from tabloid to breaking-news contender. [Link]
“Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir” by Bill Clegg (out June 7, 2010)
Read the full excerpt in New York Magazine: [Link]
A rising publishing industry star trashes his life during a bender in this intense but callow confessional. Clegg, a literary agent with William Morris Endeavor, tells the story of a two-month crack binge in which he smoked away his literary agency partnership, his $70,000 bank account, 40 pounds (he’s forever cutting new holes in his belt to cinch it to his wasting frame), and his relationship with his devoted long-suffering boyfriend. There’s crazed excess and tawdry sex, but also a sharply etched portrait of the addict’s mindset: the veering between paranoia and a compulsive sociability with the random crackheads he picks up to party with; the shrinkage of the planning horizon to the search for the next hit; the bliss of the high (the warmest, most tender caress… then, as it recedes, the coldest hand); the bender’s unstoppable acceleration until, like a cartoon character running off a cliff, it has nothing left to sustain it. The author’s efforts to impart psychological depth to his addiction—he writes of wan collegiate debauches and a childhood complex about urinating—are less convincing; it’s clear that the binge will end when his money runs out. Though richly rendered, Clegg’s crack odyssey feels like an epic bout of self-indulgence.
“The Plastic Panic” by Jerome Groopman (May 31, 2010)
Given so many variables, it is difficult to determine how harmful these chemicals might be, or if they are harmful at all, or what anyone can do to avoid their effects. In the case of BPA and other chemicals of its sort, though, their increasing prevalence and a number of human studies that associate them with developmental issues have become too worrisome to ignore. The challenge now is to decide a course of action before there is any certainty about what is truly dangerous and what is not.
Read the full article: [Link]
“Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny” by Jonathan Van Meter (May 23, 2010)
Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed. This is the mantra of the pessimist and the persecuted alike, the preemptive strike of those who tend to paint the picture a little blacker than it is. And then there is Joan Rivers, the orneriest creature ever to darken Hollywood’s door. She once told me that her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, who killed himself in 1987, lived by the heartwarming motto “Fuck them over before they fuck you over first.”
Read the full article: [Link]
“Agreeable” by Jonathan Franzen (May 31, 2010)
Read the story here: [Link]
Franzen is an American novelist who won the National Book Award for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for “The Corrections”.
“Eric Massa’s Secret” by Ryan D’Agostino (May 24, 2010)
Long before the Eric Massa scandal broke, the congressman carried the lonely burden of another secret that, if revealed, would turn his world upside down. An extraordinary look inside the mind of a man in the crisis of his lifetime.
Read the full article: [Link]
“Obama is from Mars, Wall Street is from Venus” by John Heilemann (May 22, 2010)
Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as “hostile to business,” “anti-wealth,” and “anti-capitalism”; as a “redistributionist,” a “vilifier,” and a “thug.” A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a “Chicago mob guy.” Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. “Oh, not everybody—just most of them,” he replied. “Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.”
Read the full article: [Link]
“J.J. Abrams on the Magic of Mystery” by J.J. Abrams (April 20, 2009)
“People often ask me how Lost is going to end. I usually tell them to ask Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who run that series. But I always wonder, do they really want to know? And what if I did tell them? They might have an aha moment, but without context.”
Read the full essay: [Link]
“The Calmest Man in the Clubhouse” by Charles P. Pierce (May 23, 2010)
He’s won two championships and cemented a special place in Red Sox history. But manager Terry Francona has accomplished something even more astounding during his six years in baseball’s craziest job: simply staying normal.
Read the full article: [Link]
“How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy” by Dan Fletcher (May 20, 2010)
To quell the latest concerns of users — and of elected officials in the U.S. and abroad — Facebook is getting ready to unveil enhanced privacy controls. The changes are coming on the heels of a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on May 5 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which takes issue with Facebook’s frequent policy changes and tendency to design privacy controls that are, if not deceptive, less than intuitive. (Even a company spokesman got tripped up trying to explain to me why my co-worker has a shorter privacy-controls menu than I do.) The 38-page complaint asks the FTC to compel Facebook to clarify the privacy settings attached to each piece of information we post as well as what happens to that data after we share it.
Read the full article: [Link]
Midnight Scrolling 