Posts by matt

If there’s one story I can’t imagine writing as a journalist, it’s this — the hounding-of-the-family-members-after-someone-commits-an-atrocity story:

In one image, Private England is clenching a cigarette between her teeth while giving a thumbs-up in front of naked Iraqi prisoners. In another that became public on Thursday, she is holding a leash attached to a naked prisoner’s neck.

The photographs have left her family and friends aghast and searching for answers. They are convinced that she would never have thought up anything so cruel on her own and that she must have been following orders.

Of course they are. Few families walk around suspecting their own of harboring despotic tendencies. What are they going to say? “That Lynndie. She always tortured insects and small mammals as a kid. I knew no good would come of it.”

Not a comforting thought, but we are all probably much more capable of atrocious behavior than we can imagine. Another article in today’s NYT recalls a 30-year-old study:

In 1971 researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.

Within days the “guards” had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners’ heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts.

The landmark Stanford experiment and studies like it give insight into how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, do horrible things

Because I’m back, and having been away for a while I felt the need to do a public service to the world of the Internet, and I love magazine journalism, here are all the links I could find to the articles nominated for a National Magazine Award. (Compiled before I realized Cursor did the exact same thing, only not for all the categories. D’oh!) No link means I couldn’t find it online; if you can, tell me. Whenever possible, I’ve linked to any free version I could find online (even the ghetto ones), but if it’s in brackets, you need a subscription to view it.

Finalists (winners marked with asterisk)

PERSONAL SERVICE:

Consumer Reports

– How safe is your hospital?

– Decoding your hospital bills

Men’s Health

– A tale of 3 hearts

– 100 ways to live forever

– Death by exercise

Psychotherapy Networker

– Living on purpose

Self

– Healthy breasts for life!

Time Out New York

– Your new apartment: from hunting to housewarming

LEISURE INTERESTS:

Bon Appetit

– Thanksgiving starts here

Consumer Reports

– Veterinary care without the bite

Esquire

– The $20 theory of the universe (PDF)

National Geographic Adventure

– Ultimate America

Outside

– The 25 (essential) books for the well-read explorer

REPORTING:

The Atlantic

– Columbia’s last flight

Institutional Investor

– [Misdirected brokerage]

The New Yorker

– The David Kelly affair

Rolling Stone

– The killer elite

Time

– The sum of two evils

– The secret collaborators (PDF)

– [Life behind enemy lines]

PUBLIC INTEREST:

The Atlantic Monthly

– The dark art of interrogation

BusinessWeek

– Is your job next?

– The rise of India

The New Yorker

– Lunch with the chairman

– Selective intelligence

– The stovepipe

Newsweek

– The $87 billion money pit

Self

– Pharmacy fakes

The Washington Monthly

– Malpractice makes perfect

FEATURE WRITING:

Esquire

– The league of extraordinary gentlemen (PDF)

– The falling man

Men’s Journal

– The first to die

The New Yorker

– The marriage cure

Popular Science

– Yesterday, they would have died

PROFILE WRITING:

The American Scholar

– [The Arctic hedonist]

The Atlantic Monthly

– Wynton’s blues

Esquire

– [The confession of Bob Greene]

Nest

– Francis Gabe’s self-cleaning house

The New Yorker

– Newshound

ESSAYS:

GQ

– The vulgarian in the choir loft

Men’s Journal

– Me and the X-man

Natural History

– The pleasure (and pain) of “maybe”

The New Yorker

– A sudden illness

– The end matter

COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY:

Governing

– Devolution’s double standard

– Republicans behaving badly

– Machine politics

New York Magazine

– Live from Doha

– My big fat question

– Al Jazeera’s edge

The New Yorker

– Down to earth

– Building nations

– Rush in rehab

Newsweek

– Here’s a bet for Mr. Rumsfeld

– And he’s head of intelligence?

– No way to make friends

Sports Illustrated

– Fear and clothing in Atlanta

– My big fat sports wedding

– [Yule be amazed]

REVIEWS AND CRITICISM:

The Atlantic Monthly

– The wifely duty

– Housewife confidential

– Let’s call the whole thing off

Esquire

– [Increasingly berserk developments]

– [Back to the Terminator]

– [Mr. Uncongeniality]

The Nation

– [Paint it black]

– [Vision of the sublime]

– The abstract impressionist

The New Yorker

– The thin envelope (supposedly, doesn’t work for me)

– The devil’s disciples (again, supposedly)

– After the revolution (you know the drill)

– Glacier head

– Playing for immortality

– Borrowed culture

FICTION:

The Atlantic Monthly

– Happy hour

– We have a pope!

– Yao’s chick

– What is visible

– Monstress

– Ghost-birds

Esquire

– [Presence]

– [The red bow]

– [Rest stop]

The New Yorker

– A rich man

– Runaway

– Debarking

Paris Review

– Immortality

– The final solution

– Letter from the last bastion

Zoetrope All-Story

– The phrenologist’s dream

– The smoothest way is full of stones

– [The only meaning of the oil-wet water]

PHOTO PORTFOLIO/PHOTO ESSAY:

National Geographic

– 21st century slaves

– Inhuman profit (sample)

Outside

– Tigers of the snow

Texas Monthly

– [Cuts above]

Time

– A soldier’s life

Vogue

– Alice in wonderland

W

– The Kate Moss portfolio

Some things you don’t explain. This would be one of them. Play around with it for a bit, but I’ll point you to some of my favorites.

This is all from the cruel mind of Don Hertzfeld, an animator who’s worked with the likes of Mike Judge and Bill Plympton to bring us The Animation Show.

And speaking of illustration, congrats to Robin, who completed his 24-hour comic, in case you didn’t see it.

Am I late to a now-tired Web meme? Because Subservient Chicken is really funny.

BTW, wow. Just, wow.

(Via Wiahd.)

You know that bit in my last post about people being all gung ho about a technology at first, then glimpsing the consequences of its misuse and reflexively banning not the misuse, but the technology?

That goes double for DDT, by the way.

A motorcycle ride through the ghost town of Chernobyl:

A story about a town that one can ride through with no stoplights, no police and no danger of hitting any living thing.

Watching all these movies about the end of the world, I sometimes forget that it basically happened, in a shimmering cloud over Russia in 1986. Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, many more died in radioactive fire, and a whole generation wear the meltdown in their bodies.

This website helped me remember. It starts off slow, but once the author gets going, the visuals are creepier than anything Danny Boyle could dream up — a real, recognizable city, suddenly emptied of all life.

If anything can reduce American reliance on fossil fuels in the near term, it’s a turn to nuclear energy, but that’s politically untenable, because the mere mention of the word “Chernobyl” conjures up images of babies not even a politician could love.

My uninformed impression of the history of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island is that public and political enthusiasm for nuclear technology sent us off into ReactorLand before we knew what we were doing, and then everything exploded. But one thing we learned is that there is major risk to the stuff, and due to the complexity of the technology, we can only mitigate that risk, not eliminate it.

It would be good, though, I think, if we could both confront that risk and consider its advantages with equal boldness.

Frontline, as usual, has the authoritative presentation on the matter.

(Last reminder: Don’t forget to look at the creepy photos.)

The point didn’t need to be argued, but I was trying it anyway. I was attempting to illustrate my point to Robin that tech is the beat of the future — technology increasingly informs everything we journalists journal, from the environment to foreign policy to … gay marriage.

Only I was getting stuck on gay marriage. What does technology have to do with gay marriage? I briefly considered making a point about how maybe they’ll come up with a way for men to have babies, but I thought better of it.

Fortunately, Snarkmarket-approved blogger and top-notch techie Clive Thompson has a much better imagination than I do — and a better video game collection. Comments