The ultra-celebrated Ta-Nehisi Coates has lent us plenty of support over the years, so we’d like to return the favor by calling attention to his latest conquest: the vaunted pages of The New Yorker, where his killer MF Doom profile just debuted. Though to call it a mere profile is a disservice—it’s also a [...]
Entries Tagged as 'The New Yorker'
Daily Bread
July 29th, 2009 · 3 Comments
Last night’s long subway ride afforded us an opportunity to start reading Ian Frazier’s Siberia travelogue in the latest New Yorker. So far, it’s every bit as astounding as we’d hoped—the long digression about Siberian butter, in particular, made our inner magazine geek nearly burst with glee. What can we say, we’re absolute suckers for [...]
Tags:Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia·Ian Frazier·prisons·Russia·Siberia·Soviet Union·The New Yorker
The One Thing You Can’t Fix
June 5th, 2009 · 5 Comments
We’ve been so wrapped up with parenting and screenplaying these last two weeks, we’ve had scant time to ponder the tragic demise of former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. As longtime Microkhan readers know, suicide is one of our great topics of interest. And so we were struck by the means with which Roh chose [...]
Tags:neuroscience·Roo Moo-hyun·South Korea·suicide·The New Yorker
A Finer Lens on Housing
May 19th, 2009 · 4 Comments
We’re not ashamed to declare ourselves total stats geeks, which means we’re always curious about the stories behind Big Important Numbers. And occasionally in our mathematical wanderings, we come to realize that some of those Numbers are a heckuva lot less revealing than they’re cracked up to be—batting average, for example, or Gross Domestic Product.
After [...]
Tags:Depression v2.0·economy·George Packer·housing starts·statistics·The New Yorker
Light Rail in Lagos
March 18th, 2009 · No Comments
After a lengthy bidding process, the two-line Lagos Rail Mass Transit project is set to break ground in September. This comes on the heels of the successful revamp of the city’s bus service, which now carries 180,000 passengers per day.
Can the rail project ever come to fruition in a city as chaotic (and chronically misgoverned) [...]
The Demise of Sonic Pudding
February 11th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Muzak Holdings, the company responsible for turning the reprehensible “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” into part of the cultural canon, has filed for Chapter 11. Too many of its retail clients have gone belly up in recent months, plus satellite radio was chipping away at its milquetoast market.
The news brought to mind this 2006 [...]
