You get this incredible Sunday NYTimes Magazine piece from a couple weeks back by Jack Hitt.
Hitt never goes wrong anyhow, but this odd tale of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic’s hiding in plain sight in Belgrade as a long-haired mystical healer provides an opportunity for the unlikely combination of international justice, cultural insight, and a surprising dose of humor (especially for the NY Times) in one article.
With just 5,000 or so words, the amount of narrative and nuance Hitt manages to layer in about identity and politics and some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suggestions about The Inner Struggle of Man is astonishgly efficient. Add to that the fact that Hitt almost gets killed in a right-wing bar — and then manages to turn almost getting killed into a punchline — and the piece should get some kind of award. Why isn’t there a pulitzer category for Funniest News Feature? I hereby create, nominate and award this piece for that category, if only for the following passage, in which Hitt visits a sex therapist named Bojovic who was working with Karadzic’s alter-ego, Dragan Dabic:
Bojovic is a man of many inventions and theories, which is how he and Dabic connected. He explained that his current work is a study of his nation’s penises. Before he would discuss Dabic, he insisted on walking me and Tesanovic through a scrapbook with some 2,000 Polaroid close-ups of middle-aged, mainly Serbian penises. Bojovic said that he had recently proved that Serbian men can have active sex until the age 102 and Serbian women until 84.
He seemed especially interested in treating “strong-blooded women who cannot live without sex.” For them he has invented a special device called an aplikator, which can bring on a “gentle orgasm” and which can also be marketed (he insisted on telling me despite my best efforts to stop him) to “men who have problems with the colon or problems in the bathroom.” He does not ignore the active man, however. For womanizers, especially, he has invented the Spermosan. It is a small metal cup that attaches snugly to the testicles; through the cup, Bojovic detonates “a gentle surge of electricity that makes the sperm fall asleep, and then a womanizer can go womanize without being afraid of an unwanted pregnancy.” Even though this invention is “the one most deserving of praise,” he reported that the total number of clients for the Spermosan was “not many.”
