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BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, ... Continue reading →
Unless you’ve been off the grid for all of April, you’re probably aware of the fact that author and historian Robert Caro just published The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in his giant, omnibus biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. All told, his writing about LBJ, which he’s been toiling away on since the 1970s, has reached 3,388 pages in length. As some have remarked, he’s spent more time writing about periods of LBJ’s life than the tall Texan spent living them. No personal library in New York, however, seems complete without Robert Caro’s first hefty work—his monumental biography of the larger-than-life urban planner Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York—on prominent display. The paperback edition, with its ... Continue reading →
(Corrects the date of the murder of Marcial Fernández in the print version.) Early on Aug. 29, 2010, Ismael Bojórquez, editor of the newsweekly Riodoce, in the Mexican city of Culiacán, learned that a man in his 20s had been found dead of bullet wounds in a white Lamborghini. Murders of young men are common in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa and the seat of power of the cartel of the same name, but this one was different. The victim, Bojórquez heard, was the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel and the most powerful drug kingpin in Mexico. Two and a half years earlier, when another of El Chapo’s sons was gunned down by the rival ... Continue reading →
Judy Lynch is driving a forklift, and I am trotting behind her. A plastic stopwatch hangs from my neck on a lanyard, and I am carrying a clipboard, from which I have wiped several years of warehouse dust. The dust, black and sticky, consists mostly of tread particles from solid-rubber forklift wheels. It lies a quarter-inch thick on the concrete. Lynch leaves a furrow as she drives. She asks whether she needs to slow down for me. I assure her that she needs to drive as fast as she always does; I am timing her drive. When she stops, I will note it on my clipboard. And at the end of the week the data on my clipboard will change her job and possibly cost ... Continue reading →
Photograph by Jamie Chung Continue reading →