Tag: reading

I love longreads: ‘How to Spot a Psychopath’ & ‘Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?’

June 2nd, 2011 · Zach · Longreads No comments - Tags: , ,

With extra time that bus/subway commuting has brought me, I’ve become addicted to longreads.com, a website by a fellow public transit user (in NYC) who curates some of the best in long-form journalism. “I love longreads” is a series that highlights my favorite pieces and why.

The Guardian last month ran an exclusive excerpt from Jon Ronson’s latest and ingeniously-titled book, “How to Spot a Psychopath.” Don’t judge this by its cover, though, as it is not a cheesy how-to. Rather, there’s story arc and all the good stuff that makes you want to turn the page (or scroll down on your iPad).

What struck me the most was a quote from Bob Hare, famous criminal psychologist and  father of the Psychopathy Checklist (and its revised version). “Serial killers ruin families,” he said. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

There I sat in the subway station feeling a bit stunned. This wasn’t surprising news to me, but I guess I never thought about it much lately. With the recession still having its effects, Hare’s words struck me with powerful relevance.

The recession has spawned movies and documentaries, books, radio show topics and endless headlines for the news business, yet it feels like the actual people behind the crash have stayed largely out of the picture. Albeit smaller scale, Enron, this has not been.

Nobody has gone to jail.

“This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail,” explained Matt Taibbi in a February article in Rolling Stone. “Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.”

Read Ronson’s and Taibbi’s pieces here:

I love longreads: Outside Magazine on bicycle commuting

May 31st, 2011 · Zach · Longreads No comments - Tags: ,

With extra time that bus/subway commuting has brought me, I’ve become addicted to longreads.com, a website by a fellow public transit user (in NYC) who curates some of the best in long-form journalism. “I love longreads” is a series that highlights my favorite pieces and why.

In the summer of 2007, I took to the bike for three months and went all out: bought a Metro monthly pass, a bicycle basket, a new helmet and lights. Over those 90 days, I learned a lot about the streets from an on-the-ground perspective.

The good: It’s liberating, beautiful, you learn a lot about the city, you meet more people, you get exercise, you’re always hungry and parking is a lot easier.

But the most obvious lesson was that it’s dangerous out there, though education has been improving over the years. Not only did I have to call the police twice on drivers who purposely tried to hit, or at least intimidate me, even city-hired workers like LADOT Dash drivers were not very careful around cyclists.

Secondly, many cyclists are drivers, including me. What those three months taught me was what it’s like to be on both sides of the road, so to speak. Yes, it’s frustrating for the few seconds you might be stuck behind a cyclist in a narrow lane, but you understand. You’ve been there before and now you’re patiently cruising without your foot on the pedal until there’s a safe moment to pass.

This is why I enjoyed Tom Vanderbilt’s “Rage Against Your Machine” in Outside Magazine. The deck:

What is it about cyclists that can turn sane, law-abiding drivers into shrieking maniacs? The author ponders the eternal conflict with help from bike supercommuter Joe Simonetti, who each week survives the hostile, traffic-clogged rat race between the New York exurbs and Midtown Manhattan.

Read the full article here.