The Week: Most Recent Business:

The making of The Godfather

The Week — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:06:00 -0500

FROM THE MOMENT The Godfather hit the best-seller list, early in 1969, Bob Evans and I knew that the rules of the game would change. As the heads of production at Paramount, we had been dealing with this underdog project — a manuscript by an obscure author, Mario Puzo, which had been transformed into a gripping screenplay by a still-obscure writer-director, Francis Coppola. But now The Godfather had become, by Hollywood standards, a hot property. "I suppose we should be thrilled about this," I told Evans, "but I feel a chill, not a thrill."

Within days, my chill seemed prescient. Million...

What my father taught me

The Week — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:54:00 -0500

My father’s hands
When I think of my father, I remember his hands. Liver-spotted and dexterous, hands that tied flies and built wooden toys for children at Christmas. Those hands that palmed my chest and stomach when I learned to swim now cannot break free of the bed rails—or of the esophageal cancer that slowly strangles him.

It is late March 2006, and the nurse has tied my father’s hands to steel bed rails so that in his morphine-induced state he won’t pull out his IV. Needle pricks from three weeks in the hospital have left the backs of his hands bruised and yellowed...

Evel Knievel's 'last' jump

The Week — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:50:00 -0500

EVEL KNIEVEL ARRIVED in London on May 6, 1975, which gave him almost three weeks to promote his next big jump, at Wembley Stadium. After the Snake River disaster, this would be his triumphant return, and there was no need to hold back.

Knievel might have been unknown in Great Britain, but he was made for the British tabloid press. He spoke only in headlines, dressed only in his flamboyant outfits, carried his cane full of whiskey, drove around in the candy apple red customized Cadillac pickup truck.

Frank Gifford, the former New York Giants running back, famous now as Monday Night Football&rsquo...

Made-up minds

The Week — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:10:00 -0500

A MAN WITH a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that might have been referring to arguments over the president's birthplace or the causes of climate change and autism. But it was too early for all of that — this was the 1950s — and Festinger was actually describing what would become a famous case study in psychology: a group of Chicago UFO devotees who...

The first curl of smoke

The Week — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:04:00 -0500

UNTIL ABOUT 15 years ago, I thought fire lookouts had gone the way of itinerant cowboys, small-time gold prospectors, and other icons of an older, wilder West. Then a friend of mine named Mandijane asked for my mailing address. M.J. said she’d soon have a lot of time to write letters. When spring exams were over, she’d be off to New Mexico to watch for fires.

I was intrigued, and more than a little envious; M.J.’s letters did not disappoint. She was posted in the middle of the Gila National Forest, on the edge of the world’s first designated wilderness, 130 miles north...

Prison without punishment

The Week — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:03:00 -0600

THE BOY ISN'T crying; the tears underneath his eyes are tattoos. He is standing in the snow, tall and broad, not knowing where to go at first. The guards took him from his cell to the ferry, which brought him to this island—without handcuffs. He is now left to his own devices, surrounded by red and yellow wooden houses and a church tower poking through the treetops.

This is supposed to be a prison. But Raymond Olsen doesn’t want to be here in the world’s most liberal prison, on this Norwegian island in Oslofjord, an island so small that it takes less than an hour to walk around...

The pregnancy trap

The Week — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:51:00 -0600

IN MY SHORT time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush's No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama's Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the Feds, urban schools like mine are swimming in money. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.

Here's my prediction: The money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric...

The last word: Rescue me

The Week — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:24:00 -0600

MICHAEL FERRARA HAS trouble pinpointing the exact moment when his life began to unravel. A plausible starting point, though, might be March 29, 2001.

The weather was snowy and cold on that evening nearly 10 years ago. Fifteen friends from Los Angeles, most of them in their late 20s, had chartered a jet for a few days of spring skiing to celebrate a buddy’s birthday. Something went wrong on the final descent into Aspen’s small airport; the pilot apparently couldn’t see the runway. A wing tip caught the ground, the plane flipped, and the tail segment broke off. Then the plane exploded...

The last word: Your immortal cybersoul

The Week — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:25:00 -0600

SUPPOSE THAT JUST after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the fate of the worldly goods you leave behind: financial assets, personal effects, belongings likely to have sentimental value to others, and artifacts of your life like photographs, journals, letters. Even if you haven’t made such arrangements, all of this will get sorted one way or another, maybe in line with what you would have wanted, and maybe not.

But many of us, in these worst of circumstances...

The last word: My strangled speech

The Week — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:34:00 -0600

WHAT I REMEMBER most about my stutter is not the stupefying vocal paralysis, the pursed eyes, or the daily ordeal of gagging on my own speech, sounds ricocheting off the back of my teeth like pennies trying to escape a piggy bank. Those were merely the mechanics of stuttering, the realities to which one who stutters adjusts his expectations of life. Rather, what was most pervasive about my stutter is the strange role it played in determining how I felt about others, about you.

My stutter became a barometer of how much confidence I felt in your presence. Did I perceive you as friendly, patient...

The last word: Endurance at sea

The Week — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:51:00 -0600

ALL HE COULD see, in every direction, was water. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Beside him lay his tail gunner, Francis “Mac” McNamara. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay a third crewman, pilot Russell Phillips, known by the others as Phil. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.

All of the other...

The last word: My own private island

The Week — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:43:00 -0600

So the idea was this: Six days with my wife on an uninhabited, mostly unpowered Bahamian island.

My first thought? Alcatraz is an island too.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, I experience free time as a kind of a provocation, and a week by the ocean, with all of the lying on beach chairs and staring at turquoise waters, has always struck me as less an escape than a kind of feckless surrender. Add to that a chronic need to both feed and be fed by the so-called digital grid—the e-mail, the Twitter, the RSS feeds—and it becomes clear that distraction is my distraction. The last...

Keith Richards: The year girls went mad

The Week — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:04:00 -0500

THE ARMIES OF feral, body-snatching girls began to emerge in big numbers about halfway through our first U.K. tour, in the fall of 1963. That was an incredible lineup: the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Mickie Most. We felt like we were in Disneyland, or the best theme park we could imagine. We used to hang from the rafters in the Gaumont and Odeon theaters to watch Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and the Everlys at work. There was that amazing feeling of wow, I’m actually in a dressing room with Little Richard. One part of you is the fan, “Oh my God,” and the other...

The last word: I volunteered to get sick

The Week — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:32:00 -0500

ONE MONDAY IN October, against the counsel of friends, I applied to catch a cold. Five weeks later, I am about to be tucked away on the seventh floor of a three-star hotel in order to open up my nose to assault by a virus.

I am a member of a select group of subjects taking part in a cold study at the University of Virginia. We are checking into the hotel on a Friday. The plan is to have a common strain of cold virus injected into the nose, and then hunker down for the weekend, waiting for cold symptoms to develop. My family thinks I’ve gone off the deep end. One friend dubs it my weekend ...

The last word: Terrors of the sea

The Week — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:05:00 -0500

THE CLOCK READ midnight when the 100-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors, a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality—or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave’s deep trough, it heeled 28 degrees to port, rolled 30 degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incoming seas. What chance did they have, the 47 scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong? A series of storms had trapped...

The last word: Fidel, out of his shell

The Week — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:01:00 -0500

A FEW WEEKS ago, while I was on vacation, my cell phone rang; it was Jorge Bolaños, head of the Cuban mission in Washington. “I have a message for you from Fidel,” he said. This made me sit up straight. Castro had read my recent Atlantic Monthly cover story about Israel and Iran, Bolaños told me. “He invites you to Havana on Sunday to discuss the article.” I am, of course, always eager to interact with readers of The Atlantic, so I called a friend at the Council on Foreign Relations, Julia Sweig, who is a pre-eminent expert on Cuba and Latin America: &ldquo...