There is a certain breed of non-fiction story that I call the bridge burner—a tale so damning that it ensures that the writer will never again enjoy access to a vast swath of trusted sources. A prime example would be Jon Lee Anderson’s recent “Slumlord,” in which he paints a vivid portrait of the chaos […]
Tags:dictatorship·Jon Lee Anderson·prisons·The New Yorker·Venezuela
I spent part of the long holiday weekend catching up with Evan Osnos’s account of Macau’s casino scene, a story gorgeously stuffed with details of nouveau riche excess. The mind reels at the thought that Macau’s high rollers require stools upon which to place their handbags, or that they rock $12,000 mobile phones. But the […]
Tags:China·Evan Osnos·gambling·Macau·poetry·The New Yorker·writing
I toyed with the idea of doing a couple of “Best of…” lists in these waning days of MMX, much as I did last year. But in the course of trying to pull together some worthy candidates from the realms of filmdom, books, and booze, I got to thinking about the criteria I was employing—at […]
Tags:Big Fan·books·Burkhard Bilger·Canada·movies·music·Propagandhi·punk·Sandor Katz·The New Yorker·Winter's Bone
Contrary to our expectations, the Haim Saban profile in this week’s New Yorker is a killer read. We had no idea that the man’s empire began with a spectacular insight about cartoon music royalties, or that kiddie-show billionaires have such awesome pull with world leaders. And there is at least one classic reporting detail, in […]
Tags:economics·Haim Saban·Mighty Morphin Power Rangers·television·The New Yorker
If you haven’t read it already, Jon Lee Anderson’s latest dispatch from Guinea is well worth your time. The piece does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of Moussa Dadis Camara‘s brief reign, which was marred by one of the great atrocities of recent vintage. Suffice to say that Dadis and his cronies come […]
Tags:brown-brown·cocaine·dictatorship·drugs·Guinea·Sierra Leone·The New Yorker·urban legends·weapons
The ultra-celebrated Ta-Nehisi Coates has lent us plenty of support over the years, so we’d like to return the favor by calling attention to his latest conquest: the vaunted pages of The New Yorker, where his killer MF Doom profile just debuted. Though to call it a mere profile is a disservice—it’s also a meditation […]
Last night’s long subway ride afforded us an opportunity to start reading Ian Frazier’s Siberia travelogue in the latest New Yorker. So far, it’s every bit as astounding as we’d hoped—the long digression about Siberian butter, in particular, made our inner magazine geek nearly burst with glee. What can we say, we’re absolute suckers for […]
Tags:Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia·Ian Frazier·prisons·Russia·Siberia·Soviet Union·The New Yorker
We’ve been so wrapped up with parenting and screenplaying these last two weeks, we’ve had scant time to ponder the tragic demise of former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. As longtime Microkhan readers know, suicide is one of our great topics of interest. And so we were struck by the means with which Roh chose […]
Tags:neuroscience·Roo Moo-hyun·South Korea·suicide·The New Yorker
We’re not ashamed to declare ourselves total stats geeks, which means we’re always curious about the stories behind Big Important Numbers. And occasionally in our mathematical wanderings, we come to realize that some of those Numbers are a heckuva lot less revealing than they’re cracked up to be—batting average, for example, or Gross Domestic Product. […]
Tags:Depression v2.0·economy·George Packer·housing starts·statistics·The New Yorker
After a lengthy bidding process, the two-line Lagos Rail Mass Transit project is set to break ground in September. This comes on the heels of the successful revamp of the city’s bus service, which now carries 180,000 passengers per day. Can the rail project ever come to fruition in a city as chaotic (and chronically […]
Muzak Holdings, the company responsible for turning the reprehensible “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” into part of the cultural canon, has filed for Chapter 11. Too many of its retail clients have gone belly up in recent months, plus satellite radio was chipping away at its milquetoast market. The news brought to mind this […]
