Browser Daily Newsletter 1298T
The Hunt For El Chapo
Patrick Radden Keefe | New Yorker | 28th April 2014
On the life and times of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, "obsessively secretive" boss of Mexico's Sinaloa drugs cartel, arrested in February by US and Mexican forces. His gang controlled half the drug trade across the US border; he had killed three thousand people; his informers were everywhere. Why did he let himself get caught? Had marriage to a teenage beauty queen made him careless? Or did the police arrest a double? (9,825 words)
The Art Of The Forgery
Katie Calautti | Vanity Fair | 25th April 2014
How film studios recreate art works for films such as Basquiat, Girl With A Pearl Earring, Pollock. They get permission from the estate beforehand, and destroy the imitations afterwards. When Julian Schnabel directed Basquiat, he did much of the painting himself. Most of the 125 paintings used in Pollock were homages rather than drip-by-drip copies — they were created from scratch using Pollock's paint-throwing methods (2,400 words)
Matthew Weiner: The Art Of Screenwriting
Semi Chellas | Paris Review | 28th April 2014
Interview with Mad Men writer and director. First published in last month's Paris Review print issue, now ungated online. "Cheever holds my attention more than any other writer. He is in every aspect of Mad Men, starting with the fact that Don lives in Ossining on Bullet Park Road — the children are ignored, people have talents they can’t capitalize on, everyone is selfish to some degree or in some kind of delusion" (8,480 words)
Who Wrote The Serenity Prayer?
Fred Schapiro | Chronicle Review | 28th April 2014
You know — the one that begins, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change". It was Reinhold Niebuhr. So says the researcher who first disputed Niebuhr's authorship by turning up instances of the prayer pre-dating the standard attribution to Niebuhr in 1943. Turns out the earlier instances can be traced to Niebuhr also, as quotations from the unpublished work. So, as you were: it was Niebuhr (1,820 words)
Saddam’s Tailor Sews On
Joseph Hammond | Roads & Kingdoms | 25th April 2014
Smart potentates buy their suits from Recep Cesur of Istanbul, who learned tailoring in his home town of Diyarbakir, Turkey, opened a shop in Baghdad, and snagged a prize client: Saddam Hussein. Saddam bought 80 suits, including the one worn at his trial. “His shoes were 11.6, his trousers 54, his jacket 56”. The custom did him no harm. Cesur has also sold suits to Perez Musharraf, Hamid Karzai and Nelson Mandela (1,120 words)
Why Allende Had To Die
Gabriel Garcia Marquez | New Statesman | 1st March 1974
Another classic from the New Statesman archive. Marquez was a superb journalist; this is one of his great pieces, on Allende's end: "Chileans are very much like their country in a certain way. They are the most pleasant people on the continent, they like being alive and they know how to live in the best way possible and even a little more; but they have a dangerous tendency toward scepticism" (4,500 words)
Video of the day: Silent Storms
What to expect: Time-lapse filming of electric storms and Northern Lights over Norway
Thought for the day:
"In poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities" — W.H. Auden