The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
“As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it.”
Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”
The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”
The Truth About the Tea Party Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
“Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.”
The Suicide Cathcer Michael Paterniti, GQ
“Just then a man lurched past us, a flash of green. He stopped, put both hands on the railing, and threw a leg up. The green man’s body rose, and now he was hooking his ankle on the top bar, then levering himself from vertical to horizontal until he lay on top of the railing. Now the green man began to push his way over the railing, at which point I knew that I was not dreaming and that he was going to kill himself.”
Come Party With Gaga Caitlin Moran, The Times
“The story that I thought I would find when I met Gaga – dark, otherworldly, borderline autistic diva-genius failing under the pressure of fame – just dissolves, like newsprint in the rain. All that’s left is a mardy pop sex threat – the woman who put out three, Abba-level classic singles in one year, in her early twenties, while wearing a lobster on her head. As I’m sure Mark Lawson says at times like this, Booyakasha.”
The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”
Travels With a Diva [PDF] Gay Talese, The New Yorker
“On an August night this past summer, the opera singer Marina Poplavskaya lay motionless for nearly three hours on the floor of her mother’s apartment in Moscow, having collapsed shortly after 4 AM. from inhaling noxious smoke from the forest fires that were burning out of control in the countryside; she was feverish and had no clothes on, after a sleepless night in hundred-degree heat with no air-conditioning.”
The Pink Panthers David Samuels, The New Yorker
“On the day of the heist, Denic, posing as a customer, entered the Graff store wearing a suit and carrying an umbrella. An Elvis-style pompadour wig sat awkwardly on his head, but it did not alarm the clerks, who thought that he was a rock star in disguise or a wealthy man suffering from a disease. Denic then pulled out a chrome-plated .357 Magnum, yelling, “Everyone on the floor!”“
The End Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles
“No matter how many sacrifices you make to Lady Death, no matter how rich the offerings you lay before her altar, she will know where to find you. When she comes, she will hold you tight, and she will never let you go. Don’t be frightened. She takes us all.”
See also: my top longreads of 2009
