Media Mattress

By John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New York Times (Interactive), (April 13 2014)

IN THE WORLD of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films and cover versions, a classical arrangement.

Yet despite more than 50 years of researchers’ efforts to learn who the two women were or where they came from, we have remained ignorant of even their legal names. The sketchy memories of one or two ancient Mississippians, gathered many decades ago, seemed to point to the southern half of that state, yet none led to anything solid. A few people thought they heard hints of Louisiana or Texas in the guitar playing or in the pronunciation of a lyric. We know that the word “Geechee,” with a c, can refer to a person born into the heavily African-inflected Gullah culture centered on the coastal islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. But nothing turned up there either. Or anywhere. No grave site, no photograph. Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The objects themselves — the fewer than 10 surviving copies, total, of their three known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac platters, all in private hands — these were the whole of the file on Geeshie and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing, within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.

By Scott Samuelson, The Atlantic, (April 29, 2014)

Once, when I told a guy on a plane that I taught philosophy at a community college, he responded, “So you teach Plato to plumbers?” Yes, indeed. But I also teach Plato to nurses’ aides, soldiers, ex-cons, preschool music teachers, janitors, Sudanese refugees, prospective wind-turbine technicians, and any number of other students who feel like they need a diploma as an entry ticket to our economic carnival. As a result of my work, I’m in a unique position to reflect on the current discussion about the value of the humanities, one that seems to me to have lost its way.

As usual, there’s plenty to be worried about: the steady evaporation of full-time teaching positions, the overuse and abuse of adjunct professors, the slashing of public funding, the shrinkage of course offerings and majors in humanities disciplines, the increase of student debt, the peddling of technologies as magic bullets, the ubiquitous description of students as consumers. Moreover, I fear in my bones that the supremacy of a certain kind of economic-bureaucratic logic—one of “outcomes,” “assessment,” and “the bottom-line”—is eroding the values that undergird not just our society’s commitment to the humanities, but to democracy itself.

The problem facing the humanities, in my view, isn’t just about the humanities. It’s about the liberal arts generally, including math, science, and economics. These form half of the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects, but if the goal of an education is simply economic advancement and technological power, those disciplines, just like the humanities, will be—and to some degree already are—subordinated to future employment and technological progress. Why shouldn’t educational institutions predominately offer classes like Business Calculus and Algebra for Nurses? Why should anyone but hobbyists and the occasional specialist take courses in astronomy, human evolution, or economic history? So, what good, if any, is the study of the liberal arts, particularly subjects like philosophy?  Why, in short, should plumbers study Plato?

My answer is that we should strive to be a society of free people, not simply one of well-compensated managers and employees. Henry David Thoreau is as relevant as ever when he writes, “We seem to have forgotten that the expression ‘a liberal education’ originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only.”

By Amy Wallace, Los Angeles (September 2001)

Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.

“I really take umbrage at the gotcha nature of your interrogation,” he says. His voice is taut. I can’t see his knees, but I’m sure at least one is twitching.

Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety, the entertainment industry’s dominant newspaper, is accustomed to being in charge. Studio heads woo him; strivers kiss his ass. Everyone wants his insight and his wisdom—or prominent placement in Variety’s big, glossy pages. In his weekly column, “The Back Lot,” he alternately strokes and scolds moguls and movie stars, addressing them by their first names. When Bart telephones the powerful, he is put right through. Now he’s calling me.

“I think to plunk documents out of context,” he says, “on people whose lives are as busy as yours or mine is a little unfair. This is not consistent with the access and cooperation I have afforded you.”

Over several months I have encountered a dizzying variety of Peters. I have spent many hours with Charming Peter, who is smart, funny, fierce. I have gotten to know Judgmental Peter, who loves to size up others. I’ve met Crude Peter, Brilliant Peter, Hypocritical Peter, Loyal Peter.

Bart calls himself “Zelig-like.” A setter of rules who hates to follow them, a lover of labels who resents being characterized, a seeker of the truth who doesn’t always tell it, Bart believes he is immune to the conflicts that derail lesser men. It’s one of the things that place him among the most despised and feared people in Hollywood. I listen to him speaking now. It’s a Peter I’ve never met.

“When you’re in public life, people attack you,” Intimidating Peter tells me. “But I’m taken aback by a bogus document suddenly being slammed on the desk. I’ll send you a note saying I will sue you, which I sure as hell will.”

By Mike Dash, Smithsonian (August 12, 2011)

Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. The husband did it. The wife did it. The boyfriend did it, or the ex-boyfriend did. The crimes fit a pattern, the motives are generally clear.

Of course, there are always a handful of cases that don’t fit the template, where the killer is a stranger or the reason for the killing is bizarre. It’s fair to say, however, that nowadays the authorities usually have something to go on. Thanks in part to advances such as DNA technology, the police are seldom baffled anymore.

They certainly were baffled, though, in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, in December 1948. And the only thing that seems to have changed since then is that a story that began simply—with the discovery of a body on the beach on the first day of that southern summer—has bec0me ever more mysterious. In fact, this case (which remains, theoretically at least, an active investigation) is so opaque that we still do not know the victim’s identity, have no real idea what killed him, and cannot even be certain whether his death was murder or suicide.

What we can say is that the clues in the Somerton Beach mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man,” as it is known Down Under) add up to one of the world’s most perplexing cold cases. It may be the most mysterious of them all.

Let’s start by sketching out the little that is known for certain. At 7 o’clock on the warm evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948, jeweler John Bain Lyons and his wife went for a stroll on Somerton Beach, a seaside resort a few miles south of Adelaide. As they walked toward Glenelg, they noticed a smartly dressed man lying on the sand, his head propped against a sea wall. He was lolling about 20 yards from them, legs outstretched, feet crossed. As the couple watched, the man extended his right arm upward, then let it fall back to the ground. Lyons thought he might be making a drunken attempt to smoke a cigarette.

Half an hour later, another couple noticed the same man lying in the same position. Looking on him from above, the woman could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit, with smart new shoes polished to a mirror shine—odd clothing for the beach. He was motionless, his left arm splayed out on the sand. The couple decided that he was simply asleep, his face surrounded by mosquitoes. “He must be dead to the world not to notice them,” the boyfriend joked.

It was not until next morning that it became obvious that the man was not so much dead to the world as actually dead. John Lyons returned from a morning swim to find some people clustered at the seawall where he had seen his “drunk” the previous evening. Walking over, he saw a figure slumped in much the same position, head resting on the seawall, feet crossed. Now, though, the body was cold. There were no marks of any sort of violence. A half-smoked cigarette was lying on the man’s collar, as though it had fallen from his mouth.

The body reached the Royal Adelaide Hospital three hours later. There Dr. John Barkley Bennett put the time of death at no earlier than 2 a.m., noted the likely cause of death as heart failure, and added that he suspected poisoning. The contents of the man’s pockets were spread out on a table: tickets from Adelaide to the beach, a pack of chewing gum, some matches, two combs and a pack of Army Club cigarettes containing seven cigarettes of another, more expensive brand called Kensitas. There was no wallet and no cash, and no ID. None of the man’s clothes bore any name tags—indeed, in all but one case the maker’s label had been carefully snipped away. One trouser pocket had been neatly repaired with an unusual variety of orange thread.

By the time a full autopsy was carried out a day later, the police had already exhausted their best leads as to the dead man’s identity, and the results of the postmortem did little to enlighten them. It revealed that the corpse’s pupils were “smaller” than normal and “unusual,” that a dribble of spittle had run down the side of the man’s mouth as he lay, and that “he was probably unable to swallow it.” His spleen, meanwhile, “was strikingly large and firm, about three times normal size,” and the liver was distended with congested blood.

In the man’s stomach, pathologist John Dwyer found the remains of his last meal—a pasty—and a further quantity of blood. That too suggested poisoning, though there was nothing to show that the poison had been in the food. Now the dead man’s peculiar behavior on the beach—slumping in a suit, raising and dropping his right arm—seemed less like drunkenness than it did a lethal dose of something taking slow effect. But repeated tests on both blood and organs by an expert chemist failed to reveal the faintest trace of a poison. “I was astounded that he found nothing,” Dwyer admitted at the inquest. In fact, no cause of death was found.

The body displayed other peculiarities. The dead man’s calf muscles were high and very well developed; although in his late 40s, he had the legs of an athlete. His toes, meanwhile, were oddly wedge-shaped. One expert who gave evidence at the inquest noted:

I have not seen the tendency of calf muscle so pronounced as in this case…. His feet were rather striking, suggesting—this is my own assumption—that he had been in the habit of wearing high-heeled and pointed shoes.

Perhaps, another expert witness hazarded, the dead man had been a ballet dancer?

By Hunter S. Thompson, Scanlan's Monthly [reprinted by Grantland] (June 1970)

Welcome to Derbytown

I GOT OFF the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands … big grins and a whoop here and there: “By God! You old bastard!Good to see you, boy! Damn good … and I mean it!”

In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man from Houston who said his name was something or other — “but just call me Jimbo” — and he was here to get it on. “I’m ready for anything, by God! Anything at all. Yeah, what are you drinkin?” I ordered a Margarita with ice, but he wouldn’t hear of it: “Naw, naw … what the hell kind of drink is that for Kentucky Derby time? What’s wrong with you, boy?” He grinned and winked at the bartender. “Goddam, we gotta educate this boy. Get him some good whiskey … “

I shrugged. “Okay, a double Old Fitz on ice.” Jimbo nodded his approval.

“Look.” He tapped me on the arm to make sure I was listening. “I know this Derby crowd, I come here every year, and let me tell you one thing I’ve learned — this is no town to be giving people the impression you’re some kind of faggot. Not in public, anyway. Shit, they’ll roll you in a minute, knock you in the head and take every goddam cent you have.”

I thanked him and fitted a Marlboro into my cigarette holder. “Say,” he said, “you look like you might be in the horse business … am I right?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a photographer.”

“Oh yeah?” He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. “Is that what you got there — cameras? Who you work for?”

“Playboy,” I said.

He laughed. “Well goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of — nekkid horses? Haw! I guess you’ll be workin’ pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That’s a race jut for fillies.” He was laughing wildly. “Hell yes! And they’ll all be nekkid too!”

I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. “There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “My assignment is to take pictures of the riot.”

“What riot?”

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. “At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers.” I stared at him again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

The grin on his face had collapsed. “What the hell are you talkin about?”

“Well … maybe I shouldn’t be telling you … ” I shrugged. “But hell, everybody seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They warned us — all the press and photographers — to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting … “

“No!” he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he hacked his fist on the bar. “Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!” He kept shaking his head. “No! Jesus! That’s almost too bad to believe!” Now he seemed to be jagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. “Why? Why here? Don’t they respect anything?”

I shrugged again. “It’s not just the Panthers. The FBI says busloads of white crazies are coming in from all over the country — to mix with the crowd and attack all at once, from every direction. They’ll be dressed like everybody else. You know — coats and ties and all that. But when the trouble starts … well, that’s why the cops are so worried.”

He sat for a moment, looking hurt and confused and not quite able to digest all this terrible news. Then he cried out: “Oh … Jesus! What in the name of God is happening in this country? Where can you get away from it?”

“Not here,” I said, picking up my bag. “Thanks for the drink … and good luck.”

He grabbed my arm, urging me to have another, but I said I was overdue at the Press Club and hustled off to get my act together for the awful spectacle. At the airport newsstand I picked up a Courier-Journal and scanned the front page headlines: “Nixon Sends GI’s into Cambodia to Hit Reds” … “B-52′s Raid, then 2,000 GI’s Advance 20 Miles” … “4,000 U.S. Troops Deployed Near Yale as Tension Grows Over Panther Protest.” At the bottom of the page was a photo of Diane Crump, soon to become the first woman jockey ever to ride in the Kentucky Derby.3 The photographer had snapped her “stopping in the barn area to fondle her mount, Fathom.” The rest of the paper was spotted with ugly war news and stories of “student unrest.” There was no mention of any protest action at a small Ohio school called Kent State.4

I went to the Hertz desk to pick up my car, but the moon-faced young swinger in charge said they didn’t have any. “You can’t rent one anywhere,” he assured me. “Our Derby reservations have been booked for six weeks.” I explained that my agent had confirmed a white Chrysler convertible for me that very afternoon but he shook his head. “Maybe we’ll have a cancellation. Where are you staying?”

I shrugged. “Where’s the Texas crowd staying? I want to be with my people.”

He sighed. “My friend, you’re in trouble. This town is flat full. Always is, for the Derby.”

I leaned closer to him, half-whispering: “Look, I’m from Playboy. How would you like a job?”

He backed off quickly. “What? Come on, now. What kind of a job?”

“Never mind,” I said. “You just blew it.” I swept my bag off the counter and went to find a cab. The bag is a valuable prop in this kind of work; mine has a lot of baggage tags on it — SF, LA, NY, Lima, Rome, Bangkok, that sort of thing — and the most prominent tag of all is a very official, plastic-coated thing that said “Photog. Playboy Mag.” I bought it from a pimp in Vail, Colorado, and he told me how to use it. “Never mention Playboy until you’re sure they’ve seen this thing first,” he said. “Then, when you see them notice it, that’s the time to strike. They’ll go belly up every time. This thing is magic, I tell you. Pure magic.”

Well … maybe so. I’d used it on the poor geek in the bar, and now, humming along in a Yellow Cab toward town, I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger’s brains with that evil fantasy. But, what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, “Yes, I’m from Texas,” deserves whatever happens to him. And he had, after all, come here once again to make a 19th century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable “tradition.” Early in our chat, Jimbo had told me that he hasn’t missed a Derby since 1954. “The little lady won’t come anymore,” he said. “She just grits her teeth and turns me loose for this one. And when I say ‘loose’ I do mean loose! I toss ten-dollar bills around like they were goin’ outa style! Horses, whiskey, women … shit, there’s women in this town that’ll do anything for money.”

Why not? Money is a good thing to have in these twisted times. Even Richard Nixon is hungry for it. Only a few days before the Derby he said, “If I had any money I’d invest it in the stock market.” And the market, meanwhile, continued its grim slide.

Interview by Semi Chellas, The Paris Review (Spring 2014)

Born in 1965, Matthew Weiner is barely old enough to remember the period with which his television series Mad Men has now become almost synonymous. His office is exactly what one might hope for the creator of Don Draper: a stylish mixture of midcentury modern furniture, with a cabinet full of top-shelf liquor. But it turns out that the furniture came with the building, which was designed in 1955, and the liquor, mostly gifts, is wasted on Weiner, who hardly drinks at all.

Weiner’s sensibility reveals itself on closer inspection. A framed still from the set is shot from behind the actors’ heads, showing the crew. There’s a black-and-white photograph of Groucho Marx, Alice Cooper, and Marvin Hamlisch in conversation. There’s a homemade Father’s Day card by one of Weiner’s four sons, reading “Dad Men” in red and black crayon. There’s a picture of Stedman (Oprah’s boyfriend), because when Vanity Fair photographed Weiner’s desk soon after Oprah’s, he asked what she’d had on hers. His bookshelf overflows with fiction, essays, and poetry—from Diaries of Old Manhattan to Billy Collins to Moby-Dick.

A former Jeopardy! champion who once, rather than give notes, jumped up and danced to “Zou Bisou Bisou” for Jessica Paré (Megan Draper on the show), Weiner seems never to sleep. Our interview took place in four sessions that spanned almost eighteen months—real months, that is. More time than that passed on the show during the same period, but to say exactly how much would be, in Weiner’s universe, a spoiler. We spoke late into the night after he had spent full days in preproduction meetings, in editing, in sound-mixing sessions, on set, and in the writers’ room—and we could only sit down to talk on the rare nights when he didn’t have to write. Even with this schedule, he comes in every morning inspired by a movie he’s seen, an article he’s read, or a poem he’s remembered. (I’m lucky to be a writer on the show.) Weiner begins every season by rereading John Cheever’s preface to his Collected Stories: “A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself.” The life of a showrunner leaves him almost no time to be alone, but Weiner seems always to be instructing himself.

By Aimee Levitt, Chicago Reader (March 26, 2014)

If it weren't the sort of cold, drizzly evening at the time of year when melting snow turns the entire world into a sea of mud that clings to dog paws and sometimes splashes up their legs and onto their bellies, and if he weren't a 110-pound cane corso, a breed that is capable of killing not only wild boar but also tame humans (at least according to urban legend), and if he weren't a prize show dog whose single drop of sperm is probably worth more than my entire monthly salary, Paradiso Błekitna Przystan—known to his loved ones as Ivo—and I would be off together having an adventure, maybe splashing in the surf at Montrose Beach or lazing on the deck of a fishing boat or frolicking in the snow in Cumberland Park. But instead, as darkness falls, here we are in the living room of his house in Franklin Park, which doubles as Fide Core Kennel. I am sitting on the couch drinking coffee, about which he is intensely curious. He is pacing the floor, showing off his toys and swallowing animal crackers, judiciously awarded when he sits like a good boy. The Avengers is on the TV, and Ivo's human parents, Marcin Proszek and Agata Buczak, Fide Core's owners, are trying to put into words what makes him so perfect.

The two humans have been friends a long time. They talk over each other, sometimes finishing each other's sentences. If they were dogs, Buczak would be a border collie and Proszek would be a cane corso. They talk about Ivo's proportions, his angulation, his character, his personality. They search for the right word, in English and then in Polish. Maybe it doesn't exist in either language.

"There's just something about him," Proszek says. "It's hard for us to explain."

It's not just his body, although it is splendid. He stands approximately 27 inches tall at the withers—Buczak and Proszek can't find a tape measure for a more precise number—and his chest and shoulders cannot be described without resorting to language right out of a romance novel ("broad," "muscular," "firm"). His fur is like black velvet, a little coarse, but still plush and shiny. His head is elegantly modeled; there are apparently statues that look just like him in medieval castles all over southern Italy, where cane corsos have been guard dogs since the 14th century.

And of course there are his eyes, large, brown, and limpid, with a slight bit of goo at the corners, the windows to his canine soul. At first he was suspicious of me, like a good guard dog should be, but when Buczak told him I'm OK, he gazed up at me like an enormous, innocent, trusting puppy. His eyes asked, "How can you not love a charming, magnificent creature such as myself?" (Then he plunged his nose into my crotch where, if I were a dog, I would have a gland that produces a distinctive smell so he could track me forever.)

He doesn't win dog shows just for these reasons, though. He wins because he conforms perfectly to the breed standards established by the American Kennel Club—which only began recognizing corsos in 2010—a bizarre document that says things like, "The circumference of the head measured at the cheekbones is more than twice the total length of the head," and because he moves gracefully in the ring to show off his perfect proportions and then holds still so the judges can lift his lips (only slightly pendulous, and never covered in slobber except when he's eating or drinking) to inspect his teeth and reach down for a quick squeeze to make sure he's fully equipped to father puppies. (The only thing that can destroy Ivo's magisterial calm is the nail clipper. It reduces him to a whimpering, cowering mess.)

By James McWilliams, The American Scholar (Spring 2014)

Bob Comis of Stony Brook Farm is a professional pig farmer—the good kind. Comis knows his pigs, loves his pigs, and treats his pigs with uncommon dignity. His animals live in an impossibly bucolic setting and “as close to natural as possible.” They are, he writes, so piggy that they are Plato’s pig, “the ideal form of the pig.” Comis’s pastures, in Schoharie, New York, are playgrounds of porcine fun: “they root, they lounge, they narf, they eat, they forage, they sleep, they wallow, they bask, they run, they play.” And when the fateful day of deliverance arrives, “they die unconsciously, without pain or suffering.”

Comis’s patrons—educated eaters with an interest in humanely harvested meat—are understandably eager to fill their forks with Comis’s pork. To them, Comis represents a new breed of agrarian maverick intent on bucking an agricultural-industrial system so bloated that a single company—Smithfield Foods—produces six billion pounds of pork a year. Comis provides a welcome alternative to this industrial model, and if the reform-minded Food Movement has its way, one day all meat will be humanely raised and locally sourced for the “conscientious carnivore.”

Except for one problem: Comis the humane pig farmer believes that what he does for a living is wrong. Morally wrong. “As a pig farmer, I lead an unethical life,” he wrote recently on The Huffington Post. He’s acutely aware that he “might indeed be a very bad person for killing animals for a living.” Comis’s essential objection to his line of work is that he slaughters sentient and emotionally sophisticated beings. His self-assessment on this score is unambiguous. His life is one that’s “shrouded in the justificatory trappings of social acceptance.” To those who want their righteous pork chop, he asserts that “I am a slaveholder and a murderer” and that “what I do is wrong.” Even if “I cannot yet act on it,” he concludes, “I know it in my bones.”

By Ivor Tossell, The Walrus (March 2014)

Robyn Doolittle could not sleep the night before the Toronto Starbroke the story about what happened at the Garrison Ball. Not that she was too busy; the article had already been put to bed. “It was like, oh my God, we’re running this story that says the mayor of Toronto has an issue with alcohol. This is going to be nuts,” she says. She found herself at home rereading the piece in her head over and over, wondering what the blowback would be.

Hardly anyone in Toronto knew it at the time, but a month earlier Mayor Rob Ford had turned up, visibly under the influence of who knows what, at a charity ball for injured veterans. The spectacle of the mayor intoxicated on the job would have been newsworthy on its own, but it gave Doolittle’s newspaper, the Star, an opening to tell a much bigger story—a story the reporter, a twenty-nine-year-old part-time competitive figure skater, had been chasing for a year. The Garrison Ball incident was no aberration; Toronto’s mayor had a substance abuse problem.

The revelation would light a fuse under the biggest scandal in the city’s history, and the mayor’s office knew it was coming. “My personal rule is that no one’s surprised at what goes in the paper the next day,” she explains. Officially, Ford’s staffers refused to talk to the Star about anything, but she kept in touch with them through back channels, pinging texts and Twitter messages back and forth. The newspaper gave Ford’s people one last chance to comment before the story ran. They declined.

The Star published the story on Tuesday, March 26, 2013. The response, the same day, came like a freight train. As it happened, Ford was scheduled to present a key to the city to an old family friend, the boxer George Chuvalo. A Canadian heavyweight champion in the 1960s and ’70s, he had lived a life marked by drugs and tragedy. He had lost three sons to drug addiction, and a wife to suicide. A forest of shoulder-mounted TV cameras jostled for position under the yawning dome of Toronto’s city council chamber; younger reporters crawled through them and sat cross legged on the floor at the cameramen’s feet. As soon as the presentation ended, a reporter asked the mayor about the story.

“You know what, guys? This is about George Chuvalo,” said Ford, but he pressed on nevertheless. “If you want to address this, number one, it’s an outright lie. It’s the Toronto Star going after me again, and again, and again. They’re relentless—that’s fine. I’ll go head to head with the Toronto Star any time. Let’s just wait, just let’s wait, let’s just wait till the election is, and then we’ll see what happens. It’s just lies after lies and lies.” Then, sputtering furiously, he issued a challenge: “I’ve called you pathological liars, and you are. So why don’t you take me to court? ”

By Michael Paterniti, Esquire (July 2000)

It was summer; it was winter. The village disappeared behind skeins of fog. Fishermen came and went in boats named Reverence, Granite Prince, Souwester. The ocean, which was green and wild, carried the boats out past Jackrock Bank toward Pearl Island and the open sea. In the village, on the last shelf of rock, stood a lighthouse, whitewashed and octagonal with a red turret. Its green light beamed over the green sea, and sometimes, in the thickest fog or heaviest storm, that was all the fishermen had of land, this green eye dimly flashing in the night, all they had of home and how to get there -- that was the question. There were nights when that was the only question.

This northerly village, this place here of sixty people, the houses and fences and clotheslines, was set among solid rocks breaching from the earth. It was as if a pod of whales had surfaced just as the ocean turned to land and then a village was built on their granite backs. By the weathered fishing shacks were anchors rusted like claws and broken traps and hills of coiled line. Come spring, wildflowers appeared by the clapboard church. The priest said mass. A woman drew back a curtain. A man hanged himself by the bridge. Travelers passing through agreed it was the prettiest earthly spot, snapping pictures as if gripped by palsy, nearly slipping off the rocks into the frigid waves.

Late summer, a man and woman were making love in the eaves of a garishly painted house that looked out on the lighthouse -- green light revolving, revolving -- when a feeling suddenly passed into them, a feeling unrelated to their lovemaking, in direct physical opposition to it: an electrical charge so strong they could taste it, feel it, the hair standing on their arms, just as it does before lightning strikes. And the fishermen felt it, too, as they went to sea and returned, long ago resigned to the fact that you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do. Now they too felt the shove and lock of some invisible metallic bit in their mouths. The feeling of being surrounded by towering waves.

Yes, something terrible was moving this way. There was a low ceiling of clouds, an intense, creeping darkness, that electrical taste. By the lighthouse, if you had been standing beneath the revolving green light on that early-September night, in that plague of clouds, you would have heard the horrible grinding sound of some wounded winged creature, listened to it trail out to sea as it came screeching down from the heavens, down through molecule and current, until everything went silent.

That is, the waves still crashed up against the granite rock, the green light creaked in its revolutions, a cat yowled somewhere near the church, but beyond, out at sea, there was silence. Seconds passed, disintegrating time...and then, suddenly, an explosion of seismic strength rocked the houses of Peggy's Cove. One fisherman thought it was a bomb; another was certain the End had arrived. The lovers clasped tightly -- their bodies turning as frigid as the ocean.

That's how it began.

By Rosecrans Baldwine, GQ (March 2014)

Watching The Empire Strikes Back as a child does not prepare you for the first time you field-dress an animal in the snow. Yes, the organs balloon out as if they're instantly inflating, like when Han Solo cuts open the Tauntaun. But then comes a lot of work. Ten minutes into gutting, I'm “ringing the ass,” running a four-inch German hunting knife around a pelvic canal while Uncle Cy, an experienced hunter, hisses useful advice in my ear, like “Don't ruin my fucking knife.” And “You just ruined my fucking knife.”

Followed by “I said toward me—no, the other toward me, you asshole.”

It's mid-November in western Montana, an hour past sunrise. Musk hangs in my nostrils. Since the outside temperature is roughly sixteen degrees, the act of sinking my arms in entrails actually comes as some relief from frostbite.

This is my first kill, my first hunting trip. Over the years, Uncle Cy* said if I ever made it out to Montana, he'd take me hunting. Cy's a builder and a horseman, with an armory of guns. He wears a mustache straight out of Tombstone and looks like Sam Elliott with a ponytail. Though he's no hippie.

“The difference between longhairs and hippies,” Cy once told me, “is longhairs work.”

I never considered Cy's offer seriously. We drank together at family weddings and funerals, but we existed worlds apart. Then, a few years ago, after living in big cities most of our adult lives, my wife and I moved to rural North Carolina. Since then, I'd found myself reconnecting with the woods. Men like Cy, at least men of a similar genus, are now my neighbors, my friends. When I was a kid, Cy terrified me. By the same token, he was the uncle I wanted to impress. I'd always been a wilderness buff, backpacking and climbing, but hunting with Cy was something more. I was a meat eater like him—but I'd never killed my steak and eaten it, too.

Inexperience, however, is no excuse with Cy. When you're gutting near the groin, as I am now, there's always a risk of puncture. Organs nearby contain shit and piss, and Cy's instructions are clear on this point: Do not puncture an organ full of shit or piss. For example, the rectum. It's a thin, slimy tube, flimsy and full of droppings. In my fingers, it feels like a strand of costume jewelry; one slip of the knife could mean those pellets ruin the meat, rendering the entire kill in vain.

“Now get up in the neck and grab the esophagus,” Cy says.

“In the neck?”

“Up in the neck. Come on, fingers first, guide the knife. You want to cut high as possible, then yank out the fucker.”

We'd covered this in the truck, how the esophagus and windpipe are key. They serve as the handle. Once they're snipped, I would use them, in one swift motion, to peel away the insides—the guts of an animal being essentially a suit bag full of viscera, with the throat playing a coat hanger protruding from the top.

“Well, how far?”

“Just get in there,” Cy snaps, and licks his mustache.

Picture a vengeful puppeteer. My hands slither up into the neck, toward the head, grasping the knife. I'm operating by feel, except I have no idea what I'm feeling. Inside the guck, I pinch what I take for an esophagus, squeeze it, reach higher, bring up the other hand, and go for it, pulling the knife across—fuck!

I yank out my bleeding finger and shove it in my mouth.

Uncle Cy gasps, then heaves forward, laughing. I examine my finger. Behind my ring finger's first knuckle, there's a deep half-inch slash. In my mouth I taste blood, and it's not only mine.

I shove my gooey finger in the snow. Later, I'll learn many people wear protective gloves while gutting. Not Cy. I spit out a mouthful of bile and clean my finger best as possible, wipe my mouth on my shoulder, and shove my hands back up in the neck. Find the windpipe, cut, pull, extract, and along come the heart and lungs and then nearly everything else that once kept this animal alive.

Han Solo was right: Animals do smell worse on the inside.

By Virginia Hughes, Aeon Magazine (July 29, 2013)

We drove to the orphanage on a pleasant December morning, under a sky that seemed too blue. It was a short ride through a residential neighbourhood of Bucharest, littered with posters of politicians’ heads for the upcoming elections. Nervous, I mentally recited the two rules the American professor had given me the night before: no picking up the kids, and no crying in front of them.

We pulled up to a dingy pink building, lined on all sides by tall wire fencing, and parked at the curb. After passing through the checkpoint of a stoic security guard, we stepped into an empty hallway. It was cleaner than I had expected; old plaster walls and chipped steps, yes, but no obvious filth. There was an overpowering smell of institutional food, like burned meatloaf.

Over the next hour or so, the manager of the place — a short and affable 24-year-old guy — gave us a tour. He didn’t speak much English, but Florin Ţibu, a Romanian who works with the professor, translated for us. About 50 children and teenagers lived there, boys and girls ranging in age from about six to 18, and I saw just six adults: our tour guide, three female caregivers, and two cleaning ladies in white coats. The children weren’t in school because of the big holiday: Romania’s National Day, a celebration of the country’s unification in 1918. Perhaps a typical day wouldn’t have been so chaotic. Then again, Ţibu said, the kids always flock to new visitors.

And flock they did. A boy in a red T-shirt and sweats skipped up to me, grabbed my hand, and wouldn’t let go. His head didn’t reach my shoulders, so I figured he was eight or nine years old. He was 13, Ţibu said. The boy kept looking up at me with an open, sweet face, but I found it difficult to return his gaze. Like most of the other kids, he had crossed eyes — strabismus, the professor would explain later, a common symptom of children raised in institutions, possibly because as infants they had nothing to focus their eyes on. A couple of dozen kids gathered around us in a tight circle, chirping and giggling loudly as children do. At one point they broke into a laughing fit, and I asked Ţibu what happened. They were gawking at the whiteness of my teeth, he said. Two of the girls, somewhere in that gaggle, were pregnant.

We saw the kids’ bedrooms. Each had half a dozen mattresses lying on the floor and one television set. All the TVs were blaring old cartoons, some of the same ones I remember watching in my own childhood 25 years ago. Kid after kid dragged me proudly to see their room. Once, we walked in on a cleaning lady frantically sweeping, embarrassed by the cigarette butts, grey dirt, and insect carcasses all over the floor. One of the rooms held three or four older boys, still sleeping. They were heroin addicts, I would learn, and sometimes shot up in front of the younger children.

After about half an hour of holding the sweet boy’s hand, I suddenly, urgently, needed to let go. I wriggled my fingers free, only to have him clutch them again.

We Americans drove back to St Catherine’s, a sprawling complex of late 19th-century stone buildings and desolate courtyards that was once the largest orphanage in Bucharest. Today, it’s mostly office space, with rooms along one long hallway occupied by the professor’s team. We sat in one of them to talk about the morning visit.

The professor is Charles Nelson, a neuroscientist from Harvard University who studies early brain development. In 1999, he and several other American scientists launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a now-famous study of Romanian children who were mostly ‘social orphans’, meaning that their biological parents had given them over to the state’s care. At the time, despite an international outcry over Romania’s orphan problem, many Romanian officials staunchly believed that the behavioural problems of institutionalised children were innate — the reason their parents had left them there, rather than the result of institutional life. And because of these inherent deficiencies, the children would fare better in orphanages than families.

The scientists pitched their study as a way to find out for sure. They enrolled 136 institutionalised children, placed half of them in foster care, and tracked the physical, psychological, and neurological development of both groups for many years. They found, predictably, that kids are much better off in foster care than in orphanages.

Nelson has visited Bucharest 30 to 40 times since his first trip in 1999. Some things have changed: in 2007, Romania joined the European Union (EU). It has greatly expanded its state-funded foster-care system. The number of children in institutions — or ‘placement centres’, to use the preferred bureaucratic euphemism — has dropped dramatically. But other things haven’t changed. Romania is still a post-communist country suffering from high levels of poverty and corruption. It still has a weak medical and scientific infrastructure. It still has some 9,000 children — more than half of all the children in its child protection system — living in orphanages, like the boy who took my hand.

Nelson had warned me several times about the emotional toll of meeting these children. So I was surprised, during our debrief, to hear him say that our visit had upset him. Turns out it was the first time that he had been to an orphanage with older teenagers, not all that much younger than his own son. ‘I’m used to being really distressed when I see all the little babies, or the three- and four-year-olds,’ he said. ‘But here, I almost had to leave at one point, to get myself some air. Just the thought of these kids living like this, it was really depressing.’

How does he do this? I wondered.

By Zach Baron, GQ (March 2014)

I. Among The Beastmasters

There are simply too many cute animals, so the Beastmasters are trying to cull the herd. Jack Shepherd, the original Beastmaster, sits at a computer monitor working on a post titled "The 50 Cutest Things That Happened This Year," pausing at each cute thing to gauge the reactions of the three women circled behind him. He scrolls past a video of a corgi twerking in Japan, and then a photo of an improbably, fantastically obese hedgehog named Regina. The other Beastmasters' reactions range from aww toawwwwwww. Jack clicks serenely past a capybara wearing a flannel blanket and pauses at a photograph of a gumball-sized bird perched in the valley of a spoon. "I dunno, man," he asks. "Are birds cute?"

"I think it's really cute," says BuzzFeed managing editor Summer Anne Burton, whose other official designation is Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. "It's super tiny."

Chelsea Marshall, Beastmaster 3: The Eye of Braxus—she won the job last May over hundreds of other candidates; back then, BuzzFeed was calling the position "associate animals editor"—is more skeptical. "I'm writing it down as 'Maybe chop,' " she says. Sami Main, BuzzFeed intern and apprentice to the Beastmasters, is indignant: "Oh, don't say that about birds!"

Next, they contemplate a photo of a deer nuzzling a rabbit. I am astonished. Jack is not. "Standard interspecies," he says dismissively, hitting delete. After it goes live tomorrow, "The 50 Cutest Things That Happened This Year" will be clicked on close to a million times.

Before we go any further, I want to postulate that Jack and Summer and Chelsea and Sami are real people approximately my age, 31, and that BuzzFeed of course is a real site—by one measure, the fourteenth-most-read site on the Internet—and in many ways not so different from, say, GQ, in the sense that BuzzFeed and GQ both employ writers and editors who come to work daily in a newsroom and have ideas meetings and so on. So my apologies to the Beastmasters and to BuzzFeed for the following, which makes it sound a bit like I took a hot-air balloon to Laos in order to embed with four magical lambs trapped in an amusement park run by butterflies drunk on turtle tears, rather than what I actually did, which was take the subway to an office building just off Madison Square Park. But I saw what I saw.

The Beastmasters' lair is in the far left corner of BuzzFeed's offices, past a football field's worth of open-floor-plan desks. You walk a while just to get there—past a room full of candy, Milky Ways and Twizzlers and Starbursts in inviting glass jars; past yellow pod chairs, massive egg-shaped recliners with li'l legs sticking out of them and whimsical labels affixed: PODERDICT PODERPATCH, HARRY PODDER. The company's conference rooms are named for famous Internet cats: Maru, the Japanese-born Scottish Fold whose reputation springs from his panache while fitting himself into cardboard boxes; Henri, star of a series of black-and-white French existentialist YouTube videos (sample subtitles: "My thumbs are not opposable.... Yet I oppose everything"), one of which was deemed by Roger Ebert to be the "best Internet cat video ever made"; "I Should Buy a Boat" Cat, about which your guess is as good as mine.

Summer has cool librarian glasses, yellow tights, and a black suit jacket with several photos of cats pinned to its lapel; Sami, their intern, is improbably tiny, like she was born inside the Internet and was only recently raised to human size within the confines of this brightly colored office. She is wearing a red BuzzFeed sweatshirt over a T-shirt with a line drawing of a dog on it. Jack and Chelsea are boyishly and girlishly handsome, respectively; both have the kindly, innocent look of pet-owning vegetarians, perhaps because they are both vegetarians who own pets. (Jack is in fact vegan.) All four of them are super nice.

Jack contemplates a video of a baby otter hungrily drinking milk from a syringe and then another video of an otter dunking a basketball, and the Beastmasters decide that the milk-drinking otter is more inspiring. I'm jotting all this down, my hard-hitting observations about this bounty of otters, when Summer clears her throat and asks me a question I've been dreading: "Are you a dog person or a cat person?"

I've been dreading this question because the answer is "neither," and I wasn't sure if the Beastmasters, with their earnest and openhearted love of animals and the virtual world they have come to inhabit, would understand. It was sort of why I was here, actually—to marvel at four people whose full-time job has the type of radical newness that's almost lonely, for the way it would mystify their ancestors and mine. But I'm also here to help untangle my own mystification in the face of animals, for which I have felt, in the course of my time on this planet, mostly indifference, shading occasionally toward terror. As in I'm sort of afraid of dogs?

That's basically what I stammer out, while the Beastmasters and their apprentice gaze upon me in wounded disbelief.

"Like, all of these pictures left you cold?!" Jack asks, joking but not really joking. "Because this is, like, the cutest shit that happened in an entire year."

"Do you like babies?" Summer asks. Firmer territory here. The answer is an unequivocal yes.

"Ugh, I fucking hate babies," Jack says. Then he reconsiders a bit. "Some of my favorite cute-animal pictures are animals and babies interacting, and that's cool."

But that's as far as you go with babies? I ask.

"Babies, like, by themselves, I don't know, I think I probably have the same—it's like, why? I don't get it."

It's a mystery to you?

"Well, I have a theory that if you are an animals person, it's different?" Summer says. "Like, human babies, you're comparing them to other animals, and if they were an animal, they wouldn't be a very cute one. They don't have cute fur; their eyes aren't as big as some other baby animals'; they don't have cute paws."

We're still talking about human babies, right?

Summer nods, spreading her hands in a gesture of innocence. "When you see baby animals that are hairless," she says, "they're not as cute."

A bit later, the Beastmasters will return to this same question, in the form of a proposed and quickly rejected Dolphin Week on the site—another woefully hairless animal—and Summer will put her finger on exactly what's wrong with babies and every other living being not lucky enough to be covered in hair.

"Sorry," she says. "Nothing without fur is viral."

By Susan Zalkind, Boston and This American Life (March 2014)

It’s nearly midnight in a nondescript condo complex a few blocks from Universal Studios in Orlando, and Tatiana Gruzdeva has been crying all day. Though neither of us knows it yet, as she sits on the corner of her bed and sobs in tiny convulsions, the fact that she’s talking to me will lead to her being arrested by federal agents, placed in solitary confinement, and deported back to Russia.

Next to us on the bed are nine teddy bears. Eight of them came with her from Tiraspol, Moldova. The ninth was a gift from her boyfriend, Ibragim Todashev. Today would have been Ibragim’s 28th birthday, but he is not here to see it, because in the early hours of May 22, 2013, a Boston FBI agent shot and killed him in this very apartment, under circumstances so strange that a Florida state prosecutor has opened an independent investigation. According to the FBI, just before Ibragim was shot—seven times, in two bursts, including once in the top of the head—he was about to write a confession implicating himself and alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a brutal triple homicide that took place in Waltham, Massachusetts, in September 2011.

I’m sitting awkwardly at one end of the twin bed. She’s crying quietly, cross-legged at the other end, wearing shorts and a white shirt with sequins. Most of her outfits have sequins or rhinestones. She’s 19. I’m 26. We both have long blond hair. We’ve both been close to men who were in trouble with the law, and lost them violently. We’ve been talking for about an hour, mostly about men, and parties, and moving forward after a tragedy. Ibragim was a good man, she says. He could never have committed a murder.

“I’m here alone,” she cries. “I hope it never can be worse than this.”

I try to comfort her, but it’s complicated. We both want to know why Ibragim Todashev was killed. She wants to clear his name. For me, and for the families of the Waltham murder victims, Ibragim’s shooting may have snuffed out the last chance at finding out what really happened that night. In the back of my mind is this question: Did her dead boyfriend kill my friend Erik?

By Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Times Magazine (June 15, 2012)

One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for “Father” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad.

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. “Poor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. “So far from God and so close to the United States.”

The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.

Estimating the precise scale of Chapo’s empire is tricky, however. Statistics on underground economies are inherently speculative: cartels don’t make annual disclosures, and no auditor examines their books. Instead, we’re left with back-of-the-envelope extrapolations based on conjectural data, much of it supplied by government agencies that may have bureaucratic incentives to overplay the problem.

So in a spirit of empirical humility, we shouldn’t accept as gospel the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. (That range alone should give you pause.) Still, even if you take the lowest available numbers, Sinaloa emerges as a titanic player in the global black market. In the sober reckoning of the RAND Corporation, for instance, the gross revenue that all Mexican cartels derive from exporting drugs to the United States amounts to only $6.6 billion. By most estimates, though, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán’s organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion — comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook.

The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn’t merely survive the recession — it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever.

“Chapo always talks about the drug business, wherever he is,” one erstwhile confidant told a jury several years ago, describing a driven, even obsessive entrepreneur with a proclivity for micromanagement. From the remote mountain redoubt where he is believed to be hiding, surrounded at all times by a battery of gunmen, Chapo oversees a logistical network that is as sophisticated, in some ways, as that of Amazon or U.P.S. — doubly sophisticated, when you think about it, because traffickers must move both their product and their profits in secret, and constantly maneuver to avoid death or arrest. As a mirror image of a legal commodities business, the Sinaloa cartel brings to mind that old line about Ginger Rogers doing all the same moves as Fred Astaire, only backward and in heels. In its longevity, profitability and scope, it might be the most successful criminal enterprise in history.