reads, etc.

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“The Buck Stops Here” by Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer for Criminal

One day I came home to the apartment we were living in...and he very proudly showed me a twenty dollar bill and I said “Where did this come from?” He explained that he had this color printer ... It was child’s play. I mean it couldn’t have been a more basic and pathetic operation ... And it worked.

Listen at Criminal - Phoebe Judge, Lauren Spohrer

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“My Periodic Table” by Oliver Sacks for The New York Times

In a recent issue of Nature, there was a thrilling article by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on a new way of calculating the slightly different masses of neutrons and protons. The new calculation confirms that neutrons are very slightly heavier than protons — the ratio of their masses being 939.56563 to 938.27231 — a trivial difference, one might think, but if it were otherwise the universe as we know it could never have developed. The ability to calculate this, Dr. Wilczek wrote, “encourages us to predict a future in which nuclear physics reaches the level of precision and versatility that atomic physics has already achieved” — a revolution that, alas, I will never see.

Read at The New York Times - Oliver Sacks

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“Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later” by Matt Apuzzo for The New York Times

When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country. ¶ His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer’s story.

Read at The New York Times - Matt Apuzzo

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“Matt Buchanan and John Herrman Build Bridges out of iPhones” by Joshua Topolsky for Tomorrow

“When people talk about “the media” and how things seem to be in turmoil, I think they’re referring to the coherent capital-M media composed of the newspapers and the magazines and the TV stations. ... Anything that has been around for more than a few years is in the middle of a period of very, very serious change.” “Dark, bad change?” “Mostly.”

Listen at Tomorrow - Joshua Topolsky

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“The Ebola Soccer Survivors” by Ben C. Solomon and Tommy Trenchard for The New York Times

There is no money again. Some days I ride the Okada [motorcycle taxi] and look out for a passenger. But, it’s not enough. There are a lot of survivors like me, so as for now we need to help ourselves. So I make a football club. Kenema Ebola Survivors Football Club.

Watch at The New York Times - Ben C. Solomon, Tommy Trenchard

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“Joe Gould’s Teeth” by Jill Lepore for The New Yorker

Two undergraduates, reporters for the Harvard Crimson, E. L. Hendel and M. S. Singer, went to New York to interview him. “They seemed naïve,” Gould wrote in his diary. But they weren’t so very naïve. They reported, “One of these days, someone is going to write an article on Joseph Ferdinand Gould ’11 for the Reader’s Digest. It will be entitled ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Met’ and it will present Joe Gould as an unusual but lovable old man. Joe Gould is not a lovable old man.”

Read at The New Yorker - Jill Lepore

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“The Fall of the House of Tsarnaev” by Sally Jacobs, David Filipov, and Patricia Wen for The Boston Globe

Tamerlan Tsarnaev first heard the voice when he was a young man. ¶ It came to him at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice “felt like two people inside of me.” ¶ As he got older, the voice became more authoritative, its bidding more insistent. Tamerlan confided in a close friend that the voice had begun to issue orders and to require him to perform certain acts, though he never told his friend specifically what those acts were.

Read at The Boston Globe - Sally Jacobs, David Filipov, Patricia Wen

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“The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary” by Vibeke Venema for BBC

He walked, cycled and ran with the football bladder under his traditional clothes, constantly pumping blood out to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates. Everyone thought he'd gone mad. ¶ He used to wash his bloodied clothes at a public well and the whole village concluded he had a sexual disease. Friends crossed the road to avoid him. "I had become a pervert," he says. At the same time, his wife got fed up - and left. "So you see God's sense of humour," he says in the documentary Menstrual Man by Amit Virmani. "I'd started the research for my wife and after 18 months she left me!"

Read at BBC - Vibeke Venema

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“Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers” by Greg Miller for Wired

While the military maps were extremely accurate, the maps available to ordinary citizens were next to useless. ... Worse, the maps for the masses were deliberately distorted with a special projection that introduced random variations. “The main goal was to crush the contents of maps so it would be impossible to recreate the real geography of a place from the map,” Postnikov tells me. Well-known landmarks like rivers and towns were depicted, but the coordinates, directions, and distances were all off, making them useless for navigation or military planning, should they fall into enemy hands. The cartographer who devised this devious scheme was awarded the State Prize by Stalin.

Read at Wired - Greg Miller

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“Diary” by Mike Kirby for London Review of Books

I walked out in the desert nights dreaming of doomsday scenarios. I wrote my first poem about the bomb. One day I thought I was about to laugh and cried instead. I found my symptoms in one of my college books on psychology. World War One veterans exhibited it. Reversal of emotions. And so I wrote another memo, the memo that is probably buried in classified files in the Department of Defense, the memo that was hot enough for my boss to look at me with a startled expression and send it on to Karlsven, who sent it to the security officer. ‘I want out,’ I said. ‘Or else.’ And this ‘or else’ got through to them. ‘I will not be responsible for my actions if you keep me here in this programme.’

Read at London Review of Books - Mike Kirby

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“Are You ‘Internet Sexual’?” by Emily Witt for Matter

I looked in at midnight and the camera was trained on an empty bed. Even empty, her room held the number three spot on the website. Twelve hours later, I looked again. For more than 1,700 viewers she sat on the floor naked next to a pair of ballet slippers with an unlit cigarette in her hand. Some of her chatters wanted more sex. Most of them didn’t care. “She can do whatever she wants,” wrote one. “I’m lucky to be here and having fun with the best lady in the universe.”

Read at Matter - Emily Witt

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“Before there was Photoshop” by Sean Adams for Lynda

Then I get to take my Rubylith again and try to perfectly trim it out to that exact rule. So again it’s a physical and manual labor tool, but you had to be pretty good at it. On my very first job, the art director didn’t even trust X-acto knives. She said they’re too clumsy and too fat. So we had to either use surgical scalpels or raw razor blades. Those are not fun to play with.

Watch on Youtube - Sean Adams

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"A Very Dangerous Boy” by Amy Wallace for GQ

Joseph didn’t think of killing his father until right before he did it, he said, when he woke up suddenly in his upstairs bedroom. He knew the low shelf where his father kept the loaded .357. "I wasn’t really thinking about if he was gonna die or get unconscious," he said. "I just thought maybe... he might learn a lesson... I was trying to get him to know how I feel when I get hurt... Then maybe we could go back to being friends and start all over." So Joseph got the gun and went downstairs. Recalling what happened next, the boy said he got as close as he could to his sleeping father—"It had to be less than one feet from the couch"—and squeezed the trigger. "That’s a loud gun," he told the detective.

Read at GQ - Amy Wallace

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“Nikola Tesla, An Alien Intelligence” by Samantha Hunt for Literary Hub

Tesla rarely protected his patents. Like some proto-open source advocate, he believed his inventions belonged to the world, not just him. It is rumored that after Marconi sent the first wireless letter S across the ocean, an engineer working for Tesla chided him, saying, “Looks like Marconi got the jump on you.” Tesla’s answer was surprising. “Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using 17 of my patents.” It was Tesla, not Marconi, who invented radio. Though history books forget it, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a gavel drop no one heard, upheld Tesla’s patent a few months after his death. The well-connected Marconi would go on to win the Nobel Prize for radio. And history gets written in the strangest of ways.

Read at Literary Hub - Samantha Hunt

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“When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job” by John H. Richardson for Esquire

As a recent study from the University of Bristol documented, climate scientists have been so distracted and intimidated by the relentless campaign against them that they tend to avoid any statements that might get them labeled "alarmists," retreating into a world of charts and data. But Box had been able to resist all that. He even chased the media splash in interviews with the Danish press, where they translated "we're fucked" into its more decorous Danish equivalent, "on our ass," plastering those dispiriting words in large-type headlines all across the country.

Read at Esquire - John H. Richardson

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“Whipping Boy” by Allen Kurzweil for The New Yorker

I plowed through some fifty thousand documents before I found what I was looking for. It was hidden in a supplemental appendix, within a defendant’s memorandum in aid of sentencing: “Cesar A. Viana III was born on April 24, 1958, in Manila, Philippines.” The Badische Trust’s roper, a convicted felon, was indeed the twelve-year-old who had whipped me in the tower of Belvedere. ¶ It was around this time that I began to acknowledge the obvious: Cesar had taken over my life. I tried to convince myself that the interest—my déformation professionnelle, as my wife called it—was journalistic. It was a great story, and one I knew that I would write. But I also had an emotional connection to the victims of the fraud. Their desperate narratives sparked memories of my own childhood abasement.

Read at The New Yorker - Allen Kurzweil

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“We Buy Broken Gold” by Clancy Martin for Lapham’s Quarterly

I will never forget the first time I realized we were ripping people off. It’s the one and only time in my life that my older brother, a very gentle person by nature, swore at me. A pretty young woman, maybe twenty-three at the oldest, with one baby in her arm and another in a stroller, had been waiting about an hour, and I drew her number. When she came to the counter I was already sick to my stomach. She wanted to sell her diamond engagement ring and her gold wedding band.

Read at Lapham’s Quarterly - Clancy Martin