The best way to communicate with another person on the information highway
is to exchange electronic mail.
1ļøā£ Bob Dylan, the Wanderer (New Yorker, 1964)
āLike Miss Baez, [Dylan] prefers to keep most of his time for himself. He works only occasionally, and during the rest of the year he travels or briefly stays in a house owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, in Bearsville, New Yorkāa small town adjacent to Woodstock and about a hundred miles north of New York City. There Dylan writes songs, works on poetry, plays, and novels, rides his motorcycle, and talks with his friends. From time to time, he comes to New York to record for Columbia Records.ā
The Drones - Shark Fin Blues
2ļøā£ My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard (Mother Jones, 2015)
āThe human resources director comes in and scolds Reynolds for napping. He perks up when she tells us that if we recruit a friend to work here, weāll get 500 bucks. She gives us an assortment of other tips: Donāt eat the food given to inmates; donāt have sex with them or you could be fined $10,000 or get 10 years at hard labor; try not to get sick because we donāt get paid sick time. If we have friends or relatives incarcerated here, we need to report it. She hands out fridge magnets with the number of a hotline to use if we feel suicidal or start fighting with our families. We get three counseling sessions for free.ā
Daniel Johns covers āSmells Like Teen Spiritā
3ļøā£ Unfollow (New Yorker, 2015)
āAs she grew older, she came to find comfort, and even joy, in submitting her will to the word of God. Children in Westboro must make a profession of faith before they are baptized and become full members of the church. One day in June, when she was thirteen, her grandfather baptized her in the shallow end of the Blockās pool. āI wanted to do everything right,ā she said. āI wanted to be good, and I wanted to be obedient, and I wanted to be the object of my parentsā pride. I wanted to go to Heaven.ā
Start A New Life Free Of Liberals With āConservative Moveā
4ļøā£ The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word (Esquire, 2015)
āHis wife was just thirty-four. They had two little girls. The cancer was everywhere, and the parts of dying that nobody talks about were about to start. His best friend came to help out for a couple weeks. And he never left.ā
What It Was Like To Buy A Computer In 1994
5ļøā£ E-Mail from Bill - Bill Gatesās vision for the future (New Yorker, 1993)
āAt the moment, the best way to communicate with another person on the information highway is to exchange electronic mail: to write a message on a computer and send it through the telephone lines into someone elseās computer. In the future, people will send each other sound and pictures as well as text, and do it in real time, and improved technology will make it possible to have rich, human electronic exchanges, but at present E-mail is the closest thing we have to that. Even now, E-mail allows you to meet and communicate with people in a way that would be impossible on the phone, through the regular mail, or face to face, as I discovered while I was working on this story.ā
99 Homes - Iām Not Gonna Drown
6ļøā£ The Arc of the LeBron James Story Reaches Its Climax (NY Times, 2016)
āThe technical term for a novel of growth is ābildungsroman,ā a German word (roughly, ānovel of developmentā) for a genre that started with a German book. That book ā āWilhelm Meisterās Apprenticeship,ā by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ā describes a well-to-do young man who leaves home and falls in with a troupe of actors, has adventures and finally realizes his destiny lies with a society of the well-to-do that is intimately connected to his origins.ā
Four Corners: Disco Dancing (1979)
7ļøā£ One Last Ride With The Australian Outback's One-Man Police Force (Buzzfeed, 2015)
āIn Birdsville, if you want to buy a coffee, you have one option: the Birdsville Bakery. If you want to visit a restaurant, you have one option: the Birdsville Hotel. If you want to buy alcohol, you can do so from either place. If you fall ill, youāll be treated at the Birdsville Clinic, and flown nearly a thousand miles to the state capital if you canāt be fixed there. If you want to buy basic groceries, youāll have to settle for whatever Birdsville Roadhouse has in stock. If you want to see a film or live music, youāre in the wrong town. Birdsville State School has five students. The kindergarten has three. There are no teenagers. There is no crime. There is, however, a police station. It is manned by an officer who chooses not to carry a gun, because he has no need to.ā