Byliner Spotlights

To the Graduating Class...

Byliner — 2012-05-16 10:10:00 UTC

“Don’t wait for the person next to you to be the first to speak up for what’s right,” President Obama told the graduating class of Barnard this week, “because maybe, just maybe, they’re waiting on you.”

Like Obama’s speech, the best commencement addresses are inspirational but also realistic—they touch on the challenges graduates face upon entering “the real world,” the uncertainty of what lies ahead, and the ultimate joy (and frustration) of figuring it all out.

In 2008, J.K. Rowling spoke to the Harvard Alumni Association about the importance of failure. Harry Potter’s creator told her own story of how she used “rock bottom” as a foundation for her life. “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations,” Rowling admitted. “Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.”

For a 1983 address at the University of Toronto, Margaret Atwood dispensed some solid writing advice—wondering why no one had “the foresight to inform me that the best thing I could do for myself as a writer would be back and wrist exercises”—before reflecting on some greater truths: “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it.”

In his speech to Stanford’s class of 2005, Steve Jobs ended with one of his more famous mantras: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” The Apple co-founder also stressed that one must “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Novelist David Foster Wallace was less dreamy when he addressed Kenyon College in 2005. “Let's get concrete,” Wallace said. “The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what ‘day in, day out’ really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.”

Finally, you don’t actually have to be asked to deliver a commencement address to give one. In 2006, David Sedaris made up a story of his post-Princeton days to tell the graduating class. He humorously recalled returning to his parents’ house with an Ivy League degree, an uncertain future, and four years of dirty laundry. “What are you going to do now?” his parents asked, as they all do. Sedaris’ response? “Well, I was thinking of washing some underpants.”

No. 1 What I Learned
by David Sedaris
The New Yorker | June 2006

No. 2 On Life and Work
by David Foster Wallace
The Wall Street Journal | June 2008

No. 3 “There Are Some People Who Don’t Wait.”
by Robert Krulwich
Discover | May 2011

No. 4 Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
by Steve Jobs
Byliner | June 2005

No. 5 The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
by J.K. Rowling
Harvard Magazine | June 2008

No. 6 Attitude
by Margaret Atwood
Byliner | June 1983

Remembering the Arab Spring

Byliner — 2012-05-15 13:35:00 UTC

The 2010 self-immolation of a Tunisian produce vendor inspired a series of massive democratic revolutions and uprisings that we know today as the Arab Spring. In a joint publication with McSweneey's, the newest Byliner Original, Now That We Have Tasted Hope, collects the most important primary source documents from those historic uprisings, telling the story of the Arab Spring from the perspective of those who lived it. Voices from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria provide a captivating narrative of events that forever changed a region.

It's a great companion to some of the best magazine pieces on the Arab Spring. David Kenner surveyed the region at a time when America's attention was turning to it. "Five months after Tunisian protesters overthrew their autocratic leader, sparking a wave of unrest from Libya to Oman, the euphoria of the first wave of democratic uprisings has largely given way to political stalemate, open warfare, brutal crackdowns, and backroom negotiations," he wrote. "The success stories of the Arab Spring have proved that a country's ills don't miraculously disappear when its dictator leaves the stage. Both post-revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt are facing the uncertainties of new political orders, the challenge of a wide array of popular grievances that were suppressed under previous regimes, and interim governments that have a suspect commitment to promised democratic reforms."

Hugh Roberts looked back at the revolution in Libya. "The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly," he reported. "In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months?"

Shadi Hamid mused on America's role in the uprisings. "In an ironic twist of fate, even as Americans seem to be placing an all-time low amount of faith in their ability to effect change around the world, many Arabs participating in the recent uprisings—despite their apparent fear and loathing of U.S. power—placed a disproportionate amount of their faith and hopes upon us," Hamid wrote. "Americans—and American liberals, in particular—have yet to grasp this basic paradox. In their time of need, facing imprisonment, torture, and even death, protesters, rebels, and would-be revolutionaries still look to the United States, not elsewhere. Whether they find what they’re looking for is another matter."

Vivienne Walt summed up the state of Egypt after the protests died down. "Nearly nine months since the Tahrir Square revolution, the mood continues to swing between hope and uncertainty," she wrote. "In the most optimistic scenario, the corrupt and parochial regimes of the past will give way to new Arab Tigers, similar to those that have emerged in Southeast Asia and Latin America in recent decades after dictatorships from Indonesia to Chile collapsed. Yet the Arab revolutions could just as easily produce governments dominated by military generals or radical Islamists who offer their people little improvement over the old despots."

And James Fallows explored the Arab Spring's impact on a rising power. "Just after the streets of Tunisia and Egypt erupted, China saw a series of “Jasmine” protests—until the government stopped them cold. Its methods were subtler than they had been at Tiananmen Square, and more insidious. Was the regime’s defensive reaction just paranoia?" he asked. "Or is the Chinese public less satisfied—and more combustible—than it appears?"

No. 1 Arab Spring, Chinese Winter
by James Fallows
The Atlantic | September 2011

No. 2 What Obama and American Liberals Don’t Understand About the Arab Spring
by Shadi Hamid
The New Republic | October 2011

No. 3 Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution
by Vivienne Walt
Bloomberg Businessweek | October 2011

No. 4 Who Said Gaddafi Had To Go?
by Hugh Roberts
London Review of Books | November 2011

No. 5 State of the Arab Spring
by David Kenner
Foreign Policy | May 2011

No. 6 Now That We Have Tasted Hope (Excerpt)
by Rami Jarrah
McSweeney's | May 2012

Risky Business

Byliner — 2012-05-14 09:10:00 UTC

"The entire London staff of JPMorgan Chase & Company’s chief investment office is at risk of dismissal as a $2 billion trading loss prompts the first executive departures as soon as this week," Bloomberg reports. "The firm is examining whether anyone in the unit, which employs a few dozen people in London, sought to hide risks."

The loss is just the latest reminder that high finance is risky business, as Michael Lewis has chronicled as well as anyone. "For years, investors have relied on a complex formula to manage risk," he wrote in 2008. "But what happens if the Black-Scholes model is wrong—and we're in bigger trouble than ever?"

Sebastian Junger explored the risks of international business in unstable locales. "As international trade barriers fall, Americans are increasingly going abroad to do business, often in crime-ridden developing countries where personal safety is an everyday concern. Mexico City, along with Moscow, Johannesburg and Karachi, is considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world for American businessmen, according to Kroll Associates, the international security company," Junger reported. "But with the risks come irresistible rewards. There is no better example of this than Mexico, where a 7 percent growth rate and near-doubling of trade with the United States in the past five years have produced tremendous financial opportunities, even though doing business there means putting up with a wary, nearly paranoid existence."

Looking back on the Challenger disaster, Malcolm Gladwell wondered if there was any point to the postmortems assessing its risk. "What if the assumptions that underlie our disaster rituals aren't true? What if these public post mortems don't help us avoid future accidents?" Gladwell asked. "Over the past few years, a group of scholars has begun making the unsettling argument that the rituals that follow things like plane crashes or the Three Mile Island crisis are as much exercises in self-deception as they are genuine opportunities for reassurance. For these revisionists, high-technology accidents may not have clear causes at all. They may be inherent in the complexity of the technological systems we have created."

Mark Bowden remembered a historical risk that didn't pay off for the man who took it. "In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent the Army’s Delta Force to bring back fifty-three American citizens held hostage in Iran," Bowden wrote. "Everything went wrong. The fireball in the Iranian desert took the Carter presidency with it."

And Brendan Greeley recommended that we pay more attention to a certain kind of expert that can tell us about the risks we're likely to face. "Reinsurers, massively capitalized and often named after the places where they were founded, make their living thinking about the things that almost never happen and are devastating when they do," Greeley argued. "But even reinsurers can be surprised. And the insurers who make up their market put them on the hook for everything, for all the risks that stretch the limits of imagination.They are very good at thinking about the world to come."

No. 1 Blowup
by Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker | January 1996

No. 2 The Desert One Debacle
by Mark Bowden
The Atlantic | May 2006

No. 3 Very Risky Business
by Sebastian Junger
New York Times Magazine | March 1998

No. 4 Inside Wall Street's Black Hole
by Michael Lewis
Portfolio | February 2008

No. 5 The God Clause and the Reinsurance Industry
by Brendan Greeley
Bloomberg Businessweek | September 2011

Remembering Mama

Byliner — 2012-05-12 17:23:00 UTC

Happy Mother's Day!

The holiday became known in the United States after 1870, when Julia Ward Howe issued her Mother's Day Proclamation, a pacifist reaction to the Civil War. The first modern celebration took place in 1908, the holiday was made official in 1914, and by the 1920s, its founder, Anna Jarvis, was already put off by all the commercialization. "A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world," she said. "And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment."

Fortunately, our celebration involves great stories.

In 2006, Emily Nussbaum explored the most famous of the Internet era mommy communities. "In the collective id known as UrbanBaby, New York women confess their darkest fears about parenting and marriage," she wrote, "and, not infrequently, go to war over them."

Paige Williams delved into a new phenomenon. "Now mother-daughter BFFdom is a thing, having morphed its way onto the radar of sociologists, psychologists, authors, designers, marketers, and reality-show creators," Williams wrote. "The willingness to exploit one’s pubescent daughter for adult dating and fashion advice must be a Real Housewives casting prerequisite, and there’s no telling what the upcoming VH1 reality show Mama Drama will bring as it focuses on the turbo version of bestie mothers: 'the partying parent who shares drinks, wardrobe, and social life with her daughter, and occasionally needs to be reminded that she’s the parent.'"

Lisa Belkin explored the unusual decisions of a modern mother and father. "They would not be the kind of parents their parents had been—the mother-knows-best mold. Nor the kind their friends were—the 'involved' dad married to the stressed-out working mom. Nor even, as Marc put it, 'the stay-at-home dad, who is cooed at for his sensitivity but who is as isolated and financially vulnerable as the stay-at-home-mom,'" Belkin noted. "Instead, they would create their own model, one in which they were parenting partners. Equals and peers."

Sandra Tsing Loh fessed up. "I am a bad mother. I am bad not in that fluttery, anxious, 21st-century way educated middle-class mothers consider themselves 'failures' because they snap when they are tired, because they occasionally feed their kids McNuggets, because as they journal they soulfully question whether they’re mindfully attaining a proper daily work/life balance," Loh wrote in 2009. "No, I am bad because after a domestic partnership of 20 years, when my kids were still elementary-school-age, I fell in love, had an affair, admitted it, and quite deservedly got tossed out of the house on my ass."

And Anne Lamott described going from mother to grandmother earlier than expected. "My very young son became a father in mid-July 2009, when his girlfriend, Amy Tobias, gave birth to their son," Lamott wrote. "They named him Jax Jesse Lamott, Jesse after Amy’s beloved grandmother Jessie, and Jax because they liked the way it sounded. Amy was twenty when she delivered, and Sam was nineteen. They’re both a little young, but who asked me?"

No. 1 My Mom Couldn't Cook
by Tom Junod
Esquire | September 2010

No. 2 On Being a Bad Mother
by Sandra Tsing Loh
The Atlantic | December 2009

No. 3 When Mom and Dad Share It All
by Lisa Belkin
New York Times Magazine | June 2008

No. 4 A Mother's Knishes
by Alan Richman
GQ | December 2001

No. 5 Mothers Anonymous
by Emily Nussbaum
New York | July 2006

No. 6 My Mom Is My BFF
by Paige Williams
New York | April 2012

No. 7 My Son, the Father
by Anne Lamott
Salon | March 2012

The World of 30 Rock

Byliner — 2012-05-11 09:00:00 UTC

Tina Fey’s Emmy-winning sitcom 30 Rock has been renewed for its seventh and final season. And who can’t wait to go to there?

In 2009, Maureen Dowd explored Fey's past to find out what she really wants. “Elizabeth Stamatina Fey started as a writer and performer with a bad short haircut in Chicago improv," Dowd wrote. "Then she retreated backstage at S.N.L., wore a ski hat, and gained weight writing sharp, funny jokes and eating junk food. Then she lost 30 pounds, fixed her hair, put on a pair of hot-teacher glasses, and made her name throwing lightning-bolt zingers on 'Weekend Update.' Speeding through the comedy galaxy, she wrote the hit Mean Girls and created her own show based on an S.N.L.-type show: 30 Rock.” What Fey wants then is a simple, normal life with her family, completely unaffected by fame or success. “Fey’s idea of an ideal day off is still the same: she and Jeff take Alice to the playground and go to the Neptune Room, a fish place around the corner, or the Shake Shack on the Upper West Side for shakes and burgers and fries.”

The next year, Jonathan van Meter asked Fey if she hadn't achieved that normalcy because “she is the most unlikely glamour-puss ever to triumph on such a grand scale: a glasses geek turned writer turned TV star turned movie star turned presidential-election-year sensation turned household name.” Fey’s response? “I don't fit the mold. In this country, success usually happens when you are 22 and six feet tall. Clearly, by asking that question they are kind of letting me know that I am an aberration.”

Ian Parker profiled Alec Baldwin—who plays Jack Donaghy, Liz Lemon's controlling boss—and his many miscontents. “Alec Baldwin, who stars in 30 Rock, the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin," Parker wrote. "He is fifty years old, divorced, and lives alone in an old white farmhouse in the Hamptons and an apartment on Central Park West—feeling thwarted, if not quite persecuted. In conversation, he lets out an occasional yelping laugh, but he is often wistful, in a way that is linked to professional and romantic regrets, and to a period of tabloid notoriety last year, when an angry voice mail that he left for his daughter, who was then eleven, became public.”

And Jason Gay explored Tracy Morgan's outrageous comedy (and real-life antics), which Fey frequently lifts for her sitcom. “All of a sudden everyone was talking about how funny Tracy Morgan is," Gay wrote in GQ. "It began with Morgan’s turn on 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s dry sitcom à clef about SNL, in which Morgan plays a paranoid comedian named Tracy…Jordan, who says things like ‘I love this corn bread so much I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant’ and rolls with an entourage that includes a guy named Dot Com. It may not be the biggest stretch in acting history, but Morgan does it brilliantly deadpan, like in this scene..."

Jack: Tracy…I wanted to invite you to join me at a charity golf tourney that Don Geiss is hosting at his country club in Old Saybrook.

Tracy: [walking to bar] I'm not familiar with about half the words in that sentence.

No. 1 Why Me?
by Ian Parker
The New Yorker | November 2010

No. 2 What Tina Fey Wants
by Maureen Dowd
Vanity Fair | January 2009

No. 3 Anchor Woman
by Virginia Heffernan
The New Yorker | November 2003

No. 4 Miss Tina Regrets
by Jonathan van Meter
Vogue | February 2010

No. 5 You So Tracy!
by Jason Gay
GQ | September 2007

A Childhood Treasury

Byliner — 2012-05-09 08:46:00 UTC

Maurice Sendak never considered himself a children's author—which is just one of the many reasons his stories became a beloved bedtime ritual for generations of parents and kids.

Last summer, Dave Eggers wrote a short and sweet profile of the eternally curmudgeonly author, who died yesterday at 83. “Sendak is the best-known, and by most measures simply the best, living creator of picture books," noted Eggers, who co-wrote the screenplay to Where the Wild Things Are. "And in the stretch of years since his most prolific period—when he made In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are, Kenny’s Window, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, and the “Nutshell Library”—his work has only grown in stature. No one has been more uncompromising, more idiosyncratic, and more in touch with the unhinged and chiaroscuro subconscious of a child.”

For A.S. Byatt, Alice in Wonderland was the story that changed her life. Following Alice down that rabbit hole, Byatt thought Carroll's imaginary world was the most thrilling place she'd ever visited. And then there is his extraordinary language. "The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes, of which Humpty Dumpty’s assertions of his own arbitrary power over words (a word 'means what I choose it to mean') are only the most striking," Byatt wrote. "Alice is as much part of this linguistic tissue as the creatures she meets. As she falls through the earth she doesn’t feel terror, she thinks, she talks to herself, and analyses what is happening and may happen.”

In 2005, Caitlin Flanagan examined the profound effect literature can have on children when she profiled Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers. “Mary Poppins advocates the kind of family life that Walt Disney had spent his career both chronicling and helping to foster on a national level: father at work, mother at home, children flourishing," Flanagan wrote. "It is tempting to imagine that in Travers he found a like-minded person, someone who embodied the virtues of conformity and traditionalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Travers was a woman who never married, wore trousers when she felt like it, had a transformative and emotionally charged relationship with an older married man, and entered into a long-term live-in relationship with another woman.” Flanagan went on to say that “Travers did not write her books to commemorate a happy childhood, but she did seem interested in rewriting her bad one.”

No. 1 Prisoner of Narnia
by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker | November 2005

No. 2 J.K. Rowling's Ministry of Magic
by Stephen King
Entertainment Weekly | August 2007

No. 3 Becoming Mary Poppins
by Caitlin Flanagan
The New Yorker | December 2005

No. 4 A Portrait of Maurice Sendak
by Dave Eggers
Vanity Fair | August 2011

No. 5 Nancy Drew’s Father
by Meghan O'Rourke
The New Yorker | November 2004

No. 6 Hats Off to Dr. Seuss
by C.W. Nevius
San Francisco Chronicle | March 2004

No. 7 There's Something About Alice
by A. S. Byatt
The Guardian | February 2010

Island Stories

Byliner — 2012-05-08 09:25:00 UTC

For every Gilligan trying to escape an island there are many thousands of us paying top dollar to spend a week or two with nothing but ocean on all sides.

In 2005, Michael Pollan revealed his favorite Hawaiian island. "Kauai bills itself as the 'Garden Island,' which sounds like empty brochurespeak but turns out to be absolutely and spectacularly true," Pollan wrote. "For sheer intensity of floral life—picture passion vines scrambling over ficus trees, soft beds of nasturtium lining hiking trails, bougainvillea splashing the walls of houses like flung paint—you would have to be inside a flower shop to even come close. What you hear over and over on Kauai is that this is what the rest of Hawaii looked like 30 or 40 years ago—before the high-rises, before the spring-break hordes, before the shopping malls, fast-food outlets, and Disneyfied luaus. Oh, sure, there is some of that stuff here (this is America, after all), but Kauai is so lightly developed, its landscape still so untouched, that you can’t help feeling blessed for having arrived (for once!) at a place so…before."

David Carr vacationed on a private island in the Bahamas and found it difficult to depart. "When we were packing to leave, I looked at the plastic bag of gadgets and gewgaws that I had brought, still sealed by a twist tie," Carr wrote. "When we got back to the world, they would all jump to life with their whirring and downloading, reconstructing and reiterating all I had missed. As we took the boat back to the mainland, I thought about what life would be like if I chucked them overboard. I resisted the urge, but when the time came and they roared to life, I boycotted for an hour or two. I knew without looking that the world had gotten along just fine without me."

William Langewiesche visited one of the stormiest islands in the world. "I went outside to explore Ouessant in the worsening weather. For six hours, into the night, I sloshed down the lonely roads, past sheep and shuttered hamlets, to the windward western coast, where a heavy surf pounded the rocks, raising brown salty foam that tumbled in patches through the pastures," he wrote. "I ran into the Swiss couple, who, despite their original intention to read cozily in a café, had been caught up in the spirit of the place and, like me, had been walking for hours. The scenery, we agreed, was eerily beautiful, and of course evocative of the sea, but what mattered was not anything specific so much as the mood: the entire island was infused with the drama of the oncoming weather."

And Byliner's John Tayman explained what happens when paradise and Hollywood meet on a remote beach in Thailand. "Backpackers come to this strip from all over the world for the dope or the prostitutes, or to make cut-rate arrangements to get somewhere else," Tayman noted. "Scrubby guest houses and cheap massage parlors cram the place, and narrow alleys spike off this road, where discount travel booths peddle no-fuss arrangements to Angkor Wat and Kathmandu and Phnom Penh—perennial must-sees on the backpacker circuit." But that all changed in 2000 when Leonardo DiCaprio descended to make the film The Beach. With that, Tayman wrote, "Hollywood had altered the worth of the small island, and increased its marketability."

Another paradise lost.

No. 1 My Own Private (Rental) Island, in the Bahamas
by David Carr
New York Times | November 2010

No. 2 Storm Island
by William Langewiesche
The Atlantic | December 2001

No. 3 Trouble on Fantasy Island
by John Tayman
Outside | January 2000

No. 4 Trouble in Paradise
by William Prochnau
Vanity Fair | January 2008

No. 5 Hawaii’s Wild Side
by Michael Pollan
Travel & Leisure | April 2005

(Flickr user Tom BKK)

A Jolt of Joe

Byliner — 2012-05-07 10:40:00 UTC

After oil, coffee is the most traded commodity in the world, and more often than not an integral part of the commodity trader's morning routine. Some of America's best known corporations sell it. And a lot of working adults can't stop drinking it. Or at least not without triggering a headache.

Last July, Frederick Kaufman visited one of the premier coffee tasting sessions in the world. The glamor didn't last long. "It turns out that to judge coffee really, really well, a cupper must mix each spoonful with as much ambient air as possible, thereby transforming the contents of the spoon into a flavorful spray that coats that interior of the mouth," Kaufman wrote in Wired. "The finer the spray, the easier it is to register each subtle hint of acidity, each interstitial nuance of sweet and bitter. All of which means that when an expert cupper sips his coffee, the sound produced most closely resembles a long, loud, juicy fart."

Stephan Faris remarked on one of the rare—and surprising—locations on earth where there isn't a Starbucks: Italy. "If it weren’t for Italy, Starbucks might not exist," he noted. "After all, it was on a business trip to Milan in 1983 that Howard Schultz had the revelation on which he built his global empire. At the time, Starbucks was a coffee roaster—it didn’t own a single cafe—and Schultz was its marketing director. Nearly 30 years later, the chain has expanded into some 11,000 locations in the U.S. The company has 925 outlets in Japan, 730 in the U.K., 314 in Mexico... But there’s no Starbucks in the Piazza del Duomo, the site of Schultz’s epiphany. Nor is there an outlet anywhere else in Milan, or indeed, in all of Italy."

Daniel Bergner investigated whether coffee can kick start the economies of impoverished countries. "Two million dollars represents a speck of the world’s market in packaged specialty coffee," Bergner observed about a Ugandan coffee company. "But that speck may also symbolize a bit of hope for sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2001, Malcolm Gladwell explored the very best thing about coffee. "Caffeine, whether it is in coffee or tea or a soft drink, moves easily from the stomach and intestines into the bloodstream, and from there to the organs, and before long has penetrated almost every cell of the body," he wrote. "This is the reason that caffeine is such a wonderful stimulant. Most substances can't cross the blood-brain barrier, which is the body's defensive mechanism, preventing viruses or toxins from entering the central nervous system. Caffeine does so easily. Within an hour or so, it reaches its peak concentration in the brain, and there it does a number of things--principally, blocking the action of adenosine, the neuromodulator that makes you sleepy, lowers your blood pressure, and slows down your heartbeat. Then, as quickly as it builds up in your brain and tissues, caffeine is gone—which is why it's so safe."

And Neal Pollack described the rise and fall of a Chicago coffee shop unlike any other. "Don's Coffee Club was an institution defined by inexplicable paradoxes, which often drove Don, and his customers, crazy," Pollack wrote of the owner, Don Selle, who resented his own clientele. "By the time he closed the Coffee Club, Don was opening at 9 every night and was considering pushing the hour back to 10 or 11 because he wanted to see as few people as possible."

No. 1 Java Man
by Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker | July 2001

No. 2 Coffee Club Closes
by Neal Pollack
Chicago Reader | September 2000

No. 3 Sip, Spit, Grade
by Frederick Kaufman
Wired | July 2011

No. 4 Grounds Zero: A Starbucks-Free Italy
by Stephan Faris
Bloomberg Businessweek | February 2012

No. 5 Can Coffee Kick-Start an Economy?
by Daniel Bergner
New York Times Magazine | April 2012

Meet the Avengers

Byliner — 2012-05-05 07:25:00 UTC

Hulk not give good interview, but the rest of The Avengers cast is awfully articulate.

In 2008, Matthew Klam profiled Robert Downey Jr.—Hollywood's Iron Man in every sense of the phrase—and the actor took Klam to a skydiving simulator at Universal Studios. “After about five minutes, he comes out and pulls his goggles off and, chewing his Nicorette really hard now, explains, 'I just, ah, I had an idea for one of Iron Man's flying scenes,'" Klam wrote. "It takes me a second to figure out that he's not kidding. He can't exactly explain, but he has some idea he wants to relay to the ILM guys in San Francisco, about Iron Man's aerial maneuvers. I'm a little floored, but only because there's something so crushingly sincere here, and I'm used to seeing Downey as smirky, self-mocking, and somewhat demonic. But he's also comfortable expressing a thought that any 7-year-old boy would have. “

Last month, Jason Gay talked to Scarlett Johansson (aka Black Widow) for Vogue. “Johansson appears pathologically averse to caution—the more atypical and risky the idea, the more attractive it seems," Gay observed. "This is part of the reason her résumé is stacked with memorable indies (Ghost World, for instance) and why her side music career (an idiosyncratic album of Tom Waits covers; a collaboration with singer-songwriter Pete Yorn) is anything but Top 40 formula. Her roots are New York concrete, not Hollywood glitz.” But her tendencies toward chaos eventually lead to a desire for the calm, the quotidian. “She wants to get back to normalcy, to be among friends, to return to being Scarlett, the kid from Greenwich Village’s Public School 41 who liked pro wrestling and now watches medical reality shows and the hipster spoof Portlandia.”

Edith Zimmerman interviewed Chris Evans (Captain America) last summer—and she certainly enjoyed herself. “We both drank too much and said too much," Zimmerman noted. "I never opened the notebook of questions I had brought with me.” But she did learn that Evans is a down-to-earth guy. Good looking, yes, but also self-aware. “One other thing I should mention about Chris Evans: He is the greatest person I've ever met in my life, which is what I told him I'd say in this article if he gave me back the leather jacket I accidentally left at his house, and he did.”

And Pat Jordan wrote about Samuel L. Jackson—who, as Nick Fury, put the Avengers together. How did he become the highest-grossing actor of all time? "When quality films weren’t offered to him, he took parts in movies whose characters he had wanted to be as a boy," Jordan revealed. "He is Nick Fury in The Avengers because 'who wouldn’t want to be a superhero?' He saw John Wayne in war movies, so he signed on with Friedkin to make Rules of Engagement. He saw Errol Flynn as a swashbuckling buccaneer, so he took a small (albeit key) role in the last three Star Wars movies as a Jedi warrior with a light saber. He always wanted to be chased 'by a big monster with jagged teeth,' so he did Deep Blue Sea with a shark and Jurassic Park with a dinosaur (he is eaten). When Jackson heard about a movie called Snakes on a Plane, he called the director, David R. Ellis, and said, 'You doing a movie about snakes on a plane?' Yeah. 'A plane full of poisonous snakes?' Yeah. 'I’m down.'”

No. 1 American Marvel
by Edith Zimmerman
GQ | July 2011

No. 2 The Man in the Irony Mask
by Matthew Klam
GQ | May 2008

No. 3 Scarlett Johansson: Back in Stride
by Jason Gay
Vogue | April 2012

No. 4 How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre
by Pat Jordan
New York Times Magazine | April 2012

Kentucky Derby Memories

Byliner — 2012-05-04 09:30:00 UTC

The Most Exciting Two Minutes In Sports is fast approaching. But before the jockeys saddle up for the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby, what makes the race so special?

In 1999, Laura Hillenbrand told the story behind the Derby, its founder, and the lasting appeal of the race. “The first Derby Day, May 17, 1875, drew twelve thousand spectators," Hillenbrand wrote. "Jockeys raced around an infield brimming with picnicking fans, and the winners dismounted to snatch ornate silk bags, stuffed with purse money, hanging by the finish line. Ladies, dressed to the nines, were seated in a special section discreetly out of view of betting pools. In Clark’s clubhouse spectators sipped mint juleps and enjoyed the races from the rockers on a veranda while Strauss waltzes played.”

A lot had changed by the time Hunter S. Thompson wrote his seminal story "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" in April 1970. The story marked the first appearance of Gonzo journalism. His description of the race is much more chaotic than Hillenbrand’s, but no less enthralling. “Beyond the drink and lack of sleep, our only real problem at that point was the question of access to the clubhouse," Thompson recounted. "Finally, we decided to go ahead and steal two passes, if necessary, rather than miss that part of the action. This was the last coherent decision we were able to make for the next forty-eight hours. From that point on — almost from the very moment we started out to the track — we lost all control of events and spent the rest of the weekend churning around in a sea of drunken horrors."

Few Derby champions were as memorable as the immortal Secretariat, who in 1973, became the first horse to win the Triple Crown since 1948. Upon Big Red's death in 1990, William Nack recalled the Secretariat's enormous heart. "I had never attended a Kentucky Derby or a yearling sale at Keeneland without driving out to Claiborne to visit Secretariat, often in the company of friends who had never seen him," Nack wrote. "On the long ride from Louisville, I would regale my friends with stories about the horse—how on that early morning in March '73 he had materialized out of the quickening blue darkness in the upper stretch at Belmont Park, his ears pinned back, running as fast as horses run."

And in "Gone Like the Wind," Buzz Bissinger recounted the saga of the 2006 Derby winner, Barbaro, whose owner, Gretchen Jackson, broke the one rule of horse racing: Never fall in love with a horse. “But the problem for Gretchen Jackson was she did fall in love with a horse," Bissinger wrote. "She fell in love with him because when he was in his element on the racecourse there were moments he ran with such joy and abandon that he actually flew, all four feet off the ground. She fell in love with him because of the way he soldiered on after he was tragically hurt in the Preakness Stakes in May 2006, his sense of self so intact that he bit one veterinarian smack on the butt and ran a masseuse out of the stall. She fell in love with him because of the gleam in his eyes, still bright, during those dark days in July 2006 when both his rear lower limbs became a medical nightmare…”

No. 1 Gone Like the Wind
by Buzz Bissinger
Vanity Fair | August 2007

No. 2 The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved
by Hunter S. Thompson
Scanlan's Monthly | June 1970

No. 3 Pure Heart
by William Nack
Sports Illustrated | June 1990

No. 4 Horseman, Pass By
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Harper's | October 2002

No. 5 The Derby
by Laura Hillenbrand
American Heritage | May 1999

Junior Seau, RIP

Byliner — 2012-05-03 09:11:00 UTC

"Former NFL star Junior Seau’s death by apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound follows a pattern of suicides by other high-profile football players who suffered from long-term effects of repeated brain injury," The Los Angeles Times reports. "That list of players includes Andre Waters of the Philadelphia Eagles and Terry Long of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And just last year, former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest, but not before requesting that his brain be donated to science so that researchers could study the long-term effects caused by concussion and other repeated brain injuries. Seau also suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, rather than the head."

Chris Jones picked up on the Duerson connection. "There is no doubt that over his twenty brutal seasons in the NFL, Seau suffered his share of brain damage," he wrote for Esquire. "There will be dark shadows found inside of him."

Peter King profiled the San Diego Charger standout during his playing days, and quoted another player, Jon Ritchie, describing the ferocity of his hits: "I jumped to catch the ball, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Junior coming," Ritchie recalls. "His helmet came full force under my jaw, and he hit me like I've never been hit. I couldn't hear anything out of my left ear for a week. I was deaf. And my jaw was so sore, I couldn't eat right."

In 2006, Peter Keating wrote about all the concussions that NFL football players suffer – and one team that was different. "Even as the NFL changes rules and helmet makers improve their designs, the league says concussion rates have stayed level at about 0.4 incidents per game in recent seasons-about 100 per year," he reported. "The Colts listed 20 concussions.The Patriots listed zero. And a small-town New England dentist, who literally has been inside the Patriots' heads for 25 years, says he knows why."

Alas, as Malcolm Gladwell explained, preventing concussions doesn't actually solve the problem. "Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player's real issue isn't simply with repetitive concussive trauma," he reported. "It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It's not just the handful of big hits that matter. It's lots of little hits, too."

Surveying the scene, Ben McGrath wondered if football has a future.

No. 1 Offensive Play
by Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker | October 2009

No. 2 Does Football Have a Future?
by Ben McGrath
The New Yorker | January 2011

No. 3 Big Headache
by Peter Keating
ESPN The Magazine | February 2006

No. 4 James Harrison: Confessions of an NFL Hitman
by Paul Solotaroff
Men's Journal | July 2011

No. 5 Virginia Tech Helmet Research Crucial
by Gregg Easterbrook
ESPN.com | July 2011

No. 6 Labor of Love
by Peter King
Sports Illustrated | October 2000

No. 7 Your Love Won't Save Junior Seau Now
by Chris Jones
Esquire | May 2012

Occupy Wall Street, Part 2

Byliner — 2012-05-02 08:00:00 UTC

"Demonstrators took to the streets in May Day protests across the U.S., sending a singing 'Guitarmy' to Manhattan's Union Square, smashing windows in Seattle and seizing a vacant building in San Francisco," Bloomberg News reports. "Organizers said the events marked a springtime resurgence of Occupy Wall Street, and they punctuated their message with trombones, hand-held drums, a San Francisco kayak flotilla and a crowd a half-mile long moving down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue."

In other words, Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots in cities across America are back—though whether they stick around remains to be seen.

What happened before their hiatus?

Naomi Klein lauded the protesters in a speech that she expanded into an essay. "If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis," she wrote. "When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over. And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say 'No. We will not pay for your crisis.'"

Barbara Ehrenreich explained how homelessness got onto the radar of a movement that started out in opposition to big Wall Street banks. "What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along," she wrote, "is that most ordinary activities are illegal when performed in American streets."

Christopher Watt wondered if the protesters would turn violent. "American history is full of revolutionary violence," he noted. "Will the Occupy movement follow John Brown’s example?"

And Drake Bennett profiled one of the movement's, well, it's hard to settle on a title for David Graeber. "It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently non-hierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands," Bennett reported. "Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment."

No. 1 Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now
by Naomi Klein
The Nation | October 2011

No. 2 Should Occupy Wall Street Take Up Arms?
by Christopher Watt
Maisonneuve | October 2011

No. 3 David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street
by Drake Bennett
Bloomberg Businessweek | October 2011

No. 4 Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Mother Jones | October 2011

Osama: One Year Later

Byliner — 2012-05-02 03:35:00 UTC

One year ago, a team of Navy SEALS flew into Pakistan under cover of darkness, penetrated the compound of the most wanted man on earth, and shot him dead. Twice. Thus ended the story of Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks and subject of many fine feature-length stories.

John Miller was the last U.S. journalist to interview bin Laden before 9/11. "The American imposes himself on everyone," Miller quoted bin Laden as saying in 1999. "Americans accuse our children in Palestine of being terrorists—those children, who have no weapons and have not even reached maturity. At the same time, Americans defend a country, the state of the Jews, that has a policy to destroy the future of these children. We are sure of our victory against the Americans and the Jews as promised by the Prophet: Judgment day shall not come until the Muslim fights the Jew, where the Jew will hide behind trees and stones, and the tree and the stone will speak and say, 'Muslim, behind me is a Jew. Come and kill him.' "

Three years after the attacks, Peter Bergen went in search of bin Laden. "In the past year I traveled twice to Afghanistan and Pakistan to find out how the hunt for bin Laden was progressing. While in Kabul I stayed at a comfortable guesthouse owned by a British combat cameraman—a spacious villa that is reportedly the former residence of one of Osama bin Laden's four wives. After the fall of the Taliban the villa was converted to its present use," he wrote. "For a hundred dollars and change it's now possible to have the ambiguous pleasure of sleeping in what may once have been the marital chamber of the world's most wanted man; for me, it was an appropriate place to begin an investigation into what became of bin Laden after 9/11. My investigation included more than two dozen interviews with American, Afghan, and Pakistani officials, and discussions with several people who have met with bin Laden over the years." But still he remained at large.

In 2007, Ian Frazier went hunting again—online. "Sometimes when I'm wondering what bin Laden is up to today, I go to Google Earth and take a look at Afghanistan and Pakistan. I zoom in on Kandahar, where he used to live, and then go up to Kabul and see what the downtown traffic congestion is like there," Frazier wrote. "From Kabul I go north into the Hindu Kush Mountains, and then southeastward to Paktia province, where bin Laden supposedly fought hand to hand with a Russian during the Afghan resistance and captured an AK-47, and then I go north again to the Tora Bora hills, where bin Laden and associates escaped from American and other forces in December of '01. Those sure are some bleak and stony and dusty mountains they've got in that part of the world!"

Nicholas Schmidle reconstructed the raid that killed bin Laden after interviewing sources close to the men who conducted it. "Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid," Schmidle wrote. "He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him."

And Richard Beck reflected on the celebrations that immediately followed news of bin Laden's death. "I have no memories of being frightened or angered by the attacks. My family had no close New York ties, and everything looked so much like a movie, and at 14 I was too young to imagine the grief of others and turn it into my own," he wrote about a gathering lower Manhattan. "But I am glad that this man, this TV character dressed up like a thirteenth-century shepherd with a prop AK-47, is dead. I am glad he is dead I am glad he is dead. At Ground Zero, when people began to chant 'Fuck Bin La-den' and sing songs they learned at NFL halftimes, I hated it, but what else were they going to do?"

No. 1 Outfoxing the Fox
by Ian Frazier
Outside | October 2007

No. 2 The Long Hunt for Osama
by Peter Bergen
The Atlantic | October 2004

No. 3 Greetings, America. My Name is Osama bin Laden.
by John Miller
Esquire | February 1999

No. 4 Ground Zero, May 1, 2011
by Richard Beck
n+1 | May 2011

No. 5 Getting Bin Laden
by Nicholas Schmidle
The New Yorker | August 2011

Stories with Many Stories

Byliner — 2012-05-01 08:20:00 UTC

The Empire State Building lost its crown yesterday as the tallest building in New York City when One World Trade Center reached 1271 feet. When completed, the successor to the Twin Towers will stand above the entire country—surpassing the Willis Tower (né the Sears Tower) in Chicago—though it won't be on top in the world. That honor still belongs to Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

In 2007, Esquire's Scott Raab was there when the first steel was finally planted at Ground Zero for what was then known as the Freedom Tower. In the fourth part in his series on the rebuilding in Lower Manhattan, Raab wrote: "Ground Zero has seen few special days since 9/11, and those few have been mainly sad. The yearly anniversaries, when the roll of the dead is read aloud and bells toll to mark the minutes when the jets struck the Twin Towers — and again to mark their separate falls to earth — are heartbreaking. But days like this — when the politicians and cameras return to the empty pit for yet another hollow milestone, and the governor gives the same stale speech, and the memory of 9/11 and the inch by inch and day by day of rebuilding are buried ever deeper beneath a sour crust of cynical, jingo-fueled, pandering dung — days like today tend to be worse, the crib-smothering of hope. Not today."

But what happens when the engineers get it wrong? Joe Morgenstern explored that problem in a 1995 New Yorker story about the building of New York's Citicorp Center. Midway through construction, William LeMessurier learned that his design for the skyscraper would not withstand hurricane force winds. "The weakest joint, he discovered, was at the building's thirtieth floor," Morgenstern reported. "If that one gave way, catastrophic failure of the whole structure would follow. Next, he took New York City weather records provided by Alan Davenport and calculated the probability of a storm severe enough to tear that joint apart. His figures told him that such an event had a statistical probability of occurring as often as once every sixteen years—what meteorologists call a sixteen-year storm."

Bigger, of course, is not always better. Last year in Vanity Fair, A.A. Gill explored how the the towering skyline in Dubai is ultimately meaningless because the country is broke. "A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce," Gill wrote. "They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor." As always, enormous wealth is the quicksand on which this desert empire was constructed. "Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai."

No. 1 How Skyscrapers Can Save the City
by Edward Glaeser
The Atlantic | March 2011

No. 2 The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis
by Joe Morgenstern
The New Yorker | May 1995

No. 3 The Tower Builder
by John Seabrook
The New Yorker | November 2001

No. 4 Dubai on Empty
by A. A. Gill
Vanity Fair | April 2011

No. 5 The Steel
by Scott Raab
Esquire | June 2007

It's "Win or Go Home" Time in the NBA

Byliner — 2012-04-30 10:07:00 UTC

The NBA playoffs are here—and it's a victory for the league that they're even being held.

Lee Jenkins described the circumstances at the beginning of a season that almost wasn't. "Last season was one of the most captivating since the Jordan era, with Griffin hurdling sedans, Derrick Rose rupturing ankles, Kevin Durant beaming en route to a second straight scoring title and Dirk Nowitzki splashing one-legged fadeaways—not to mention the villains in Miami, the redeemers in Oklahoma City and the castoffs in Memphis," he mused. "The NBA and its players recaptured a legion of alienated fans, as evidenced by spiked TV ratings, only to offend them all over again with a work stoppage during a recession, a lockout that featured 24 fruitless bargaining sessions and a pair of antitrust lawsuits."

Of course, the season was saved in the end.

Assessing the teams, Brian Phillips profiled the newly ascendant Oklahoma City Thunder, now the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference. "In a way, Oklahoma City is what happens when a team succeeds before it carries any real burden of history. The team has no hated rivals, no despised executives, no former players who've stabbed it in the back, nothing resembling bitterness or the sort of clogged sports hatred that helps the rest of us survive the winter," he wrote. "It's basketball as if the world were new. This year — it almost goes without saying — everyone is back, everyone is healthy, almost everyone should have improved."

The Clippers are another franchise making a strong showing despite a lackluster postseason history. Chris Ballard wrote glowingly about the dunks of their most exciting player, 22-year-old Blake Griffin.

Luke O'Brien paid tribute the best player on last year's championship squad, the Dallas Mavericks. "Over his 13 seasons, Dirk Nowitzki has been about as reliable and lethal a scorer as the league has ever seen. He's put up 20-plus points a game for more than a decade and taken shallow teams into the playoffs, occasionally far, for the last 11 years. This is not a man who's undergone enormous transformation as a player," he wrote. "In being exactly who he's always been, he defies the silly notion in American sports that an athlete has to don armor, psychic or otherwise, to win a title."

And Bill Simmons described LeBron James' disappearing act in last year's playoffs. "In pressure moments, he comes and goes … and when it goes, it's gone," he recounted. "He starts throwing hot-potato passes, stops driving to the basket, shies away from open 3s, stands in the corner, hides as much as someone that gifted can hide on a basketball court. It started happening in Game 3, then fully manifested itself in Game 4's stunning collapse, when he wouldn't even consider beating DeShawn Stevenson off the dribble."

No. 1 Blake Griffin's Poster Boys
by Chris Ballard
Sports Illustrated | February 2011

No. 2 It’s Time for LeBrondown, Part II
by Bill Simmons
Grantland | June 2011

No. 3 Stay Soft, Dirk Nowitzki
by Luke O'Brien
Deadspin | June 2011

No. 4 'Tis The Season
by Lee Jenkins
Sports Illustrated | December 2011

No. 5 Thunder!!!
by Brian Phillips
Grantland | December 2011

(NBA.com)