Longreads

The financial crisis had many causes—too much borrowing, foolish investments, misguided regulation—but at its core, the panic resulted from a lack of transparency. The reason no one…

In September 1863, a local paper in Somerset, England, ran an article about a man and a woman from Taunton whose child had been stricken with scarlet fever. Depressingly common, a child suffering…

Published in the May 1972 issue of Esquire I have to begin with a few words about androgyny. In grammar school, in the fifth and sixth grades, we were all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that…

Nick Hanauer is the kind of innovator and venture capitalist expected to power the country's next wave of growth. So why does he insist that only the fading middle class can rescue America? Reuters…

IT WAS THE FACE of F. Murray Abraham playing Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman's film adaptation of Peter Schaffer's Amadeus that finally touched me off. Who knew that envy had so many expressions,…

I ate dinner recently at a pop-up restaurant. It’s the latest thing for urban foodies, at least in Toronto, where I live: Individual chefs doing small, high-concept dinners in fly-by-night…

Wikimedia Commons Over its 154 years, the pages of Today, on what would be Twain's 176th birthday, his name and his work are still provocative. At the time of its publication, his most…

In cities like Allentown and Bethlehem, Spanish-speaking immigrants are influencing the local culture. But America is changing them, too. Video: The changing face of Eastern…

A rocket scientist, a mathematician, a brain surgeon, and a lawyer walk into a room. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but at Intellectual Ventures it's something more serious—a business model. IV traffics in a single product: invention. On June 17 it invited 10 of the most blindingly brilliant doctors and scientists in the country to a daylong brainstorming session at its headquarters in a nondescript office building next to a swamp in Bellevue, Wash. Assembling around a conference table, the diverse group, which included physicists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, physicians from several major medical centers, and a Stanford University postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering, spent the day pondering a complex question: How can surgery be improved? The goal wasn't just incremental advances but multibillion-dollar lightning bolts that could change the world and, not incidentally, make all of the participants rich.