• ‘I was a teacher for 17 years, but I couldn’t read or write’
  What’s it like to not know how to read? And to live the lie for most of your life? While becoming a professional in a field that requires reading? That’s an interesting story and this article shares the highlights from it.

  In one exam the professor put four questions on the board. I was sitting at the back of the room, near the window, behind the older students.

  I had my blue book and I painstakingly copied the four questions off the board. I didn’t know what those questions said.

  I had arranged for a friend of mine to be outside the window. He was probably the smartest kid in school, but he was also shy and he’d asked me to fix him up with a girl by the name of Mary who he wanted to go to the spring formal dance with.

  I passed my blue book out the window to him and he answered the questions for me.

  I had another blue exam book underneath my shirt and I took it out and pretended I was writing in it.

  I was praying that my friend was going to be able to get my book back to me and that he was going to get the right answers.

• The Man Who Cracked the Lottery
  This story is about someone who was able to cheat the lottery system, but did so in a semi-intelligent manner to hide his tracks for a number of years.

  Three months after the winning ticket was announced, the lottery issued another public reminder. Another followed at six months and again at nine months, each time warning that winners had one year to claim their money. “I was convinced it would never be claimed,” says Mary Neubauer, the Iowa Lottery’s vice president of external relations. Since 1999, she had dealt with around 200 people who had won more than $1 million; she’d never seen a winning million-dollar ticket go unclaimed. “And then comes Nov. 9, 2011.”

  A man named Philip Johnston, a lawyer from Quebec, called the Iowa Lottery and gave Neubauer the correct 15-digit serial number on the winning Hot Lotto ticket. Neubauer asked his age — in his 60s, he said — and what he was wearing when he purchased the ticket. His description, a sports coat and gray flannel dress pants, did not match the QuikTrip video. Then, in a subsequent call, the man admitted he had “fibbed”; he said he was helping a client claim the ticket so the client wouldn’t be identified.

  This was against the Iowa Lottery rules, which require the identities of winners to be public. Johnston floated the possibility of withdrawing his claim. Neubauer was suspicious: The winner’s anonymity was worth $16.5 million?

• The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of Juul
  A fascinating look at the teen sub-culture of vaping, especially the brand Juul. Since I’m too old, I guess I will only find out about this stuff by reading it second hand.

  I talked to a sixteen-year-old girl in Westchester County, whom I’ll call Leslie, to keep her from narcing on her classmates. Juuls caught on at her school last summer, she said. Upperclassmen bought them, underclassmen tried them at parties, and suddenly people were Juuling in the cafeteria, charging Juuls on their laptops, and filling their Instagram and Snapchat feeds with Juuling videos and GIFs. “Dealers will announce on Snapchat that they’ve bought a hundred of them, and they’ll write the price, the date, and the meeting place for kids to show up with cash,” Leslie said. She described her classmates Juuling in locker rooms, and on the trail behind the school—where people also drink and smoke weed—and in the quad, if they’re ballsy. “But the biggest spots are the bathrooms,” she said. “There are so many people Juuling sometimes that all the varieties of flavors just get morphed into one big vape. Some days I’m just, like, why do you need to do this at 11 A.M.?”

• Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry
  This article starts by talking about people who need to rent family, but it really touches upon how people form connections.

  Ishii says that, two or three times a year, he stages entire fake weddings. The cost is around five million yen (around forty-seven thousand dollars). In some cases, the bride invites real co-workers, friends, and family members. In others, everyone is an actor except the bride and her parents. The rental best man gives a speech, often bringing the rental guests to tears. When Ishii plays the groom, he experiences complicated emotions. A fake wedding, he says, is just as much work to organize as a real one, and he and the client plan together for months. Invariably, Ishii says, “I start to fall for her.” When it comes to the kiss, some brides prefer to fake it—they touch cheeks so it looks like they’re kissing—but others opt for the real thing. Ishii tries to pretend he’s acting in a movie, but often, he says, “I feel like I’m really getting married to this woman.”

• How Anna Delvey Tricked New York
  The story about Anna Delvey’s con, which is more fascinating than your average con because it seemed to affect many well placed and rich individuals in New York. Strangely, her downfall was not that she got too greedy (e.g., wanting money), but because she became too aspirational building her foundation (which might have been a proxy to greed).

  If Aby Rosen, the son of Holocaust survivors, could come to New York and fill skyscrapers full of art, if the Kardashians could build a billion-dollar empire out of literally nothing, if a movie star like Dakota Johnson could sculpt her ass so that it becomes the anchor of a major franchise, why couldn’t Anna Delvey? During the course of my reporting, people kept asking: Why this girl? She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not?

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: japan, lottery, pocket