Rose George | Metropolitan Books | August 2013 | 17 minutes (4,213 words) The following is the opening chapter of Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything . Our thanks to the author for sharing it with the Longreads community. * * * Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of…

When I told him I had made contact with one of his clients, he was confused, then spooked. “How?” he asked, with the frightened look of a man who realizes he has left a gas burner on at home. I said I thought I knew the names of several clients, and he appeared stricken while he declined to comment…

Illustration by Christoph Niemann For more than a decade, we’ve been living through a commodity price boom. From oil to wheat and beef, the general rule has been that if you farmed it, caught it, or took it out of the ground you were probably going to make money selling it. But there has been a…

Morsi’s out, Zimmerman’s free, Spitzer’s back, Snowden’s still in Moscow, and the G.O.P. is still dominated by right-wing true believers. Those were the headlines during my two weeks off, and, in the interest of maintaining the holiday spirit for another day or two, I’m going to focus on the last…

“I’m thirteen percent black, man!” My cousin Bennett was always saying and texting stupid stuff, so this proclamation came as no surprise to me. But for his part, Mr. cole stood with his shiny head cocked to the side, his mouth a quarter open, wheezing against the moist august air. he was shrouded…

Jump to S weat dripping down your forehead, soaking your entire body. Waking up, relieved the horror you just experienced wasn't real. Seeing nuclear missiles drop from the sky, streaking to the ground, toward the city you live in, impacting as the nuclear wave sweeps toward your Northern California…

Among the many videogames at a recent arts and games festival in Baltimore, none was more difficult to navigate than "That Dragon, Cancer." The challenge: Getting through it without crying. The game is about war, but not the bullet-blazing variety normally associated with gaming. It's an…

Neill Jameson is best known to readers as Imperial, frontman of the excellent USBM band Krieg. Along with Blake Judd, Wrest and Thurston Moore (!) he was also part of the black metal project Twilight. I got to know Neill during an interview about three years ago and we’ve kept in touch since. As our…

Do the Right Thing is currently #5 on my all time best movies list . It was my best film of 1989 as well, earning the top slot after my emotional first viewing of it at Jersey City’s State Theater. The State is where I was introduced to director Spike Lee’s work. I saw She’s Gotta Have It and School…

FADER #23, AUGUST 2004: He produces bands he likes with broad gestures and micromanages his daily life with prayer beads and a two-way. This is Rick Rubin, Inc. “I can remember driving into Malibu one night,” says über-producer Rick Rubin. “It was probably eight o’clock on a summer night, it had…

Record Rundown This is the story of how an eighteen-year-old influenced the sound of an era. by This is the story of how an eighteen-year-old influenced the sound of an era. It is the story of how one man’s musical craftsmanship artfully bridged the rough funk of the ’70s and the polished…

Philippe Zdar takes a firm hand in making music better. It is at once utterly baffling and totally understandable why Philippe Zdar has tried to talk me out of coming to see him DJ at Le Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées—“It’s too late, it’s going to be terrible,” he says. And he’s half right. Any…

Photo: Michael/Flickr For the past several years, as the days of summer start getting just enough shorter for you to realize that fall is coming, I've received an email announcing that Earth Overshoot Day has arrived. Every year it comes a little bit earlier—which is the essence of the problem.…

This is going to hurt. In the past few months, it has been almost impossible to open a newspaper or turn on a television without encountering a story about another underage girl being raped, another female politician harassed, another trans woman murdered. But as women, girls and a growing number of…

In April, I will turn 23. Mine is a generation raised upon the principles of irony, easy-to-access streaming pornography, and the idea that it’s not totally crazy to take care of imaginary shit. Think of the Tamagotchi you damn near prostrated yourself to your parents to get for Christmas and…

(Photo: Mark Seliger. Styling by April Johnson/2B Management; Hair by Michelle Johnson; Makeup by Nuria Sitja for La Mar/The Milton Agency; Manicure by Deborah Lippman for Deborah Lippman Collection.) When she leaves, I approach to ask what that was about. “Me and him have a big rivalry,” he says…

Videogum Videogum Heaven Just Got A Little More Videogum Here we are. There was no reason to think that Videogum would be around, the way that it has been for the past… | February 7, 2014 - 5:00 pm Videogum Life Is A Highway, You Guys from: Verne Troyerto: [email protected] date: Sun, Dec 14, 2008…

I have a shameful confession: I actually like “tacked-on” multiplayer modes. I delight in their mediocrity. I spend more time playing them than they deserve. Over the last five years or so, as developer after developer announced their superfluous multiplayer modes, I’ve heard your collective groans…

On a muggy Friday a couple of weeks ago, Dave Arnold was covered in a fine coating of chickpea dust. He had spent the day shooting foods like buckwheat, corn, pasta, rice, and lentils out of a puffing gun—a large, steel contraption that weighs as much as a car. In the course of experimenting with a…

The Philippines is a top supplier of seafarers (Wikimedia Commons) When Norwegian anthropologist Gunnar Lamvik first began living in Iloilo city, a seafaring haven in the southern Philippines, he sensed he wasn't getting the richest and most detailed information about the shipping experience from…

You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, what with his rare Ralph Lauren Polo jackets and vintage Nikes, but Just Blaze is a hacker. Yes, that Just Blaze. Sure, the term has in the past decade or so been transmogrified into a catchall that includes anyone who can code in Javascript or jailbreak an…

Like many of you, I'm a huge fan of Breaking Bad. So, when I saw the moody desert character portraits AMC released to promote the final season, I was excited and a little curious. They were shot by Frank Ockenfels III, a commercial photographer who has shot everything from big time movie posters…

Jack Handey—who is indeed a real person, despite common misconception—is best known for his series of hilarious faux aphorisms, Deep Thoughts . Handey is also the writer of many of SNL 's best sketches from the 80s and 90s, such as "Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car," "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,"…

Joe Jaszewski / The Idaho Statesman / AP Customers bag their own groceries at checkout counters at WinCo Foods on Fairview Avenue in Boise, Idaho, on July 1, 2013 Retail analysts say the world’s biggest retailer has reason to fear a small grocery chain that’s based in Idaho and boasts a business…

This hot dog is good, but next time let's get the marrow dumplings in consommé Photo by Mario Tama/Getty At the age of 4, children of the near-extinct Kawésqar tribe of Chilean Patagonia spear and roast their own shellfish. This is eight years earlier than when kids who vacation in Cape Cod, Mass.,…

Jump to Forty years ago, the most popular video game in America was Pong , a title in which two white slabs hit an equally white ball back and forth. A couple decades later, it was Super Mario World , a game in which two plumbers collect power-ups and jump across colorful worlds to save a princess.…

Where we're going, we don't need women ... Linda Hamilton with time-traveller Michael Biehn in The Terminator. Photograph: Alamy P oor Rachel McAdams . Three time-travel movies and not a whiff of the action. First was 2009's The Time Traveller's Wife , in which Eric Bana played a Chicago librarian…

Kara Gordon and an aachen head. Image Courtesy GM Every car has a soundscape—even noise is designed. During the car sales pitch, there is a moment when you first get behind the wheel. You hit the ignition, the engine turns over, and the car comes to life. You are bathed in the sound of countless…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The movie “Hannah Arendt,” which opened in New York in May, has unleashed emotional commentary that mirrors the fierce debate Arendt herself ignited over half a century ago, when she covered the…

Dear Prime Minister, M Rogge, Lord Coe and Members of the International Olympic Committee, I write in the earnest hope that all those with a love of sport and the Olympic spirit will consider the stain on the Five Rings that occurred when the 1936 Berlin Olympics proceeded under the exultant aegis…

PPL Park. (PHOTO: KKIMPHOTOGRAPHY /FLICKR) If it were its own country, Chester, Pennsylvania’s per capita income would rank between Turkey and Dominica. On average, its residents are poorer than those of Uruguay, Lebanon, and Antigua and Barbuda. The city has been part of a program for economically…

As the world’s population hurtles toward an estimated 9 billion by 2050, global food shortages are becoming a very real problem. In no sector is this more apparent than the meat industry. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that around 70 percent of all agricultural land on Earth…

What I'm Not Sure About Given the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to identify some things as having gone "right" and other things as having gone "wrong." However, some of the most interesting things to consider are the ones that aren't so easily pinned down. Here are some questions that are…

The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts has become a bargaining chip in the city’s bankruptcy battle. Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times As Detroit files for bankruptcy — the largest American city ever to do so — the impressive collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts has become a…

Photo: Noah Kalina/Noah Kalina I have 700 friends on Facebook, 36 of whom I consider exes. Not all are ex-boyfriends—in the eleven years that “boyfriend” has been a name for men in my life, I have referred to nine as “boyfriends.” The rest are men I dated casually, guys I dated disastrously,…

“Mr. Duggan?” “Yes?” “What is the purpose of your visit to France?” “Tourism!” I n the same way that the detective movie is a fantasy about city life, the spy movie is a fantasy about tourism. No one is more beautifully adapted to the urban environment than the detective — he knows its secrets,…