New Yorker magazine alert thread

Love the piece about Rays outfielder Sam Fuld.

Seems like a swell guy, too bad about coming from Stanfurd. Also, companion podcast to the Fuld article, with McGrath and ~*sigh*~ Amy Davidson: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/07/04/110704on_audio_mcgrath

sports. it is not good. for humanity.

does amy davidson write anything longer than the comment on the ny-er blogs?, & in the magazine? she's so consistently good lately, i wondered if she had any longer pieces up in the archives.

george packer making me sad again

Going all the way back to Eagleman in Texas, trying to see if time slows down for real when a person senses they're in danger. I finally found video of the "ride" he uses to gauge his research subjects' fear factor with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBJ5e2ihVUg

From Cracked.com, of course.

good find!
watching that makes me feel. unwell.

i really want to try it. (for science.)

hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

getting the shakes just thinking about it

I'm 100% sure if I did this I would turn around mid-fall, stretch out like superman, catch a draft and fly right outside of the net and plummet to my death.

That cracked article was great btw, read it this morning as well. I remember Action Park from when I was a kid. Glad I never went.

Actually I did sorta go, Action Park was part of Vernon Valley/Great Gorge, which is the only place I ever went skiing.

Then, in July, a scad operator in the Wisconsin Dells triggered a drop before the net had been lifted fully into place. When the rider—a twelve-year-old girl named Teagan Marti—landed in the net, her momentum stretched it to the ground. The impact fractured her skull and broke her spine in ten places.

I rode this once:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Drop

NB I am terrified of rollercoasters but was forced to by peer pressure. luckily my friend next to me was even more scared and I distracted myself by telling him everything was gonna be alright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8SxuR1GTsg

according to the web it takes you up 62 meters or 200 feet. O_o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NldcjT9sr0

okay this one is scarier! as commenters have noted the worst part is the rise to the top, you keep on going and going and going and when you think there's no way you can go up anymore, you go up another 10 meters. and then when you're at the top you look down and around at the park and think 'holy fuck this is high.' and all you can do is wait for the plunge.

And of course, leave it to the Japanese to come up with a ride that offers a 120º drop

"A 120-degree…. wha, how doest that work?" you ask.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Vy_YzhwHE

(Anyway, sorry for the derail.)

you guys, nothing is as fucked up as the Tower of Terror

well okay the freefall into the cargo net is more fucked up

My little sister – who has her "in's" with the Disney folks and worked for MGM for like three years – claims she rode the Tower of Terror shortly after it opened.

Before the fun starts and the car drops, like every other fricking ride in the Kingdom, there's an announcement made that there's been a problem detected in the ride and that it might go haywire (or take you into the Twilight Zone.)

There's comes a point where the doors open (like an elevator) and there's a dark room with ghosts and shit and Rod Serling comes out to say something to the riders. Except, as my sister says when she first rode it, the interior fluorescent lights were turned on in that level, so you saw this utility room with wooden beams and sawdust with this pane of glass in front of the car that the ghostly apparitions were being projected on.

So my sister really believed there was a problem with the ride and then WHOOOOSH.

holy shit, that would scar me for life

I mean, the ride itself was bad enough (curse you stealth drop), having trappings malfunctions on top of it would be yeargh

AAAAAUGH!

I have spent entire afternoons looking at Disney rides that have gone wrong, freaking myself out for days afterward. Even when I was 12, that Snow White ride gave me nightmares.

Sunny's taking Beeps out to D-Land this fall, so at least one more generation will have the opportunity for black-velvet nightmares of robotic amphibians.

holy shit at the pause before the 120 degree drop. rollercoaster designers are dicks.

wanna ride that coaster so bad

terrifying

We got my mom on Space Mountain by successfully fooling her that the ride was 'educational'. It certainly was!

The hedge-fund article in the new issue is good, especially if you're curious about someone who makes more than a billion a year and has a strange/successful organization.

We got my mom on Space Mountain by successfully fooling her that the ride was 'educational'. It certainly was!

One of my earliest memories is riding the conveyor belt/escalator out of that ride and toward the exit, holding my dad's hand and trying to dry my tears, watching on the side these anthropomorphic robots act out scenes of the future (a kid holding a frog up to his mom.)

haha i went on space mountain sometime shortly after it opened. i was not into rollercoasters at that age, and it was dark, and i was unhappy. and then my dad unbuckled my belt a smidge too early and i hit my head on the bar as the car jerked one more time. he still feels bad about it.

Free fall rides are the worst rides. Just watching those videos gave me unpleasant anxiety and nausea. Also, and I don't want to look it up because it really upsets me, but somewhere in North Carolina a girl lost a foot on one of those rides in a really gruesome way and I hate being the kind of person who disregards statistics in favor of irrational terror due to one aberrant event, but I am totally being that kind of person here.

ughhhhh supreme scream, i think that's the most afraid i've been on a ride ever. like the actual falling part is pretty awesome, but they hold you at the top for SO LONG that you start thinking "oh god, this motherfucker is going to break down with me up here, i am beyond the reach of human assistance, i am going to die."

even worse was when my high school held its winter formal at knotts berry farm, so you were up there in the dead of night in fancy dress, except barefoot so you didn't accidentally drop a heel and kill the ride operator.

Still making my way through the article (no paywall!) on Rwandan cyclists. It's not without some cringe-worthy white man's burden segments, but it's really fascinating all the same.

*unreads this revive*

Actually, roller coasters have fewer injuries a year than merry-go-rounds, mostly because very few people try to jump off of roller coasters.

this probably belongs in a putin thread, but just as an interesting counterpart to the video posted after ariel levy's burlusconi article:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/new-weapon-in-putins-army-flashed-boobs/

"pop a boner for 'bama"

after noticing i hadn't really touched last week's i just started & was finding v interesting the thing about asylum in the us, but now i just want to skip to 2/3 of the way through the bin laden thing

this is popcorn-eatingly fascinating btw

halfway through Bin Laden article. Great stuff.

yeah, i enjoyed it too. it mostly steers clear of anything except for a walkthrough of the operation itself, and is pretty fascinating.

it mostly steers clear of anything except for a walkthrough of the operation itself

so neatly arranged, though; the CLIFFHANGERish section that ends with the helicopter crashing was really effective

Haven't read the OBL article yet, but it's getting some pushback: http://www.registan.net/index.php/2011/08/04/the-schmidle-muddle-of-the-osama-bin-laden-take-down/

damn that piece owns him pretty hard

I thought the nyer was pretty famous for its factchecking

I finished that piece today just as I heard about the helicopter crash in Afghanistan on the radio, early reports of which made it sound like some of the SEALs from the bin Laden mission had been killed.

In hindsight it does seem unlikely that they would have had the time or inclination to be interviewed at great length, which you'd need for the level of detail in the article.

That's a serious slapdown of the article in question.

I love how indignant and self righteous professors can get sometimes

the bin laden assignation piece was p weak regardless

wow who was his lover