Longreads

When Jose Rios walked into a Bank of America branch last year, he hoped to open an account for the car repair shop he owned. He didn’t expect to end up with a prison sentence. Days after Rios…

What we can learn about the future of books from its past:

"Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the 'business of literature.' Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of itself. We have come to believe that the taste-making, genius-discerning editorial activity attached to the selection, packaging, printing, and distribution of books to retailers is central to the value of literature. We believe it protects us from the shameful indulgence of too many books by insisting on a rigorous, abstemious diet. Critiques of publishing often focus on its corporate or capitalist nature, arguing that the profit motive retards decisions that would otherwise be based on pure literary merit. But capitalism per se and the market forces that both animate and pre-suppose it aren’t the problem. They are, in fact, what brought literature and the author into being."

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil Viking, 336 pp., $27.95

At the edge of a stubbly, dried-out alfalfa field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant,…

In the 1920s, American fiction desperately needed its own private detective. It was overrun with Sherlock Holmes imitators–erudite puzzle solvers who refused to get their hands dirty. Enter…

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Germs are terrifyingUdo Weber/iStockphoto. The germs have been busy. In the United States this year alone, we’ve lost people both to old enemies such as whooping cough and to relatively new…

In the mid-1980s, journalist Joel Sappell and a colleague began a five-year examination of the Church of Scientology that would ultimately produce a 24-article series. It would also change…