Longreads

by Saul Bellow Recommended by Mary Gaitskill WHEN THERE IS TOO MUCH GOING ON, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round…

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting…

The first story Maya wrote was about a world in which people split themselves in two instead of reproducing. In that world, every person could, at any given moment, turn into two beings, each one…

Rosenthal, who in her short time there is already well liked, struck some as a curious decision since she came from a publication few ever heard of. For a while, foreign policy wonk Leslie Gelb…

Twitter is building a machine to convert 140 characters on Barack Obama, Ashton Kutcher, narcissism, the struggle for human freedom, and Starbucks into cash—and quick, before its moment passes. Is this asking too much of even the world’s best technologists?

The first time they had sex, during that initial exploration of unfamiliar flesh, John Ross uttered words to Ann Maloney that would sound to her like prophecy. You have the body of a young girl.…

In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the CIA continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill. The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed. #Sept11

Veblen MacKay-Sim was engaged to Paul Vreeland, a postgraduate research fellow in neuroscience, and the time had finally come to bring him home to meet the family. A classic rite of passage,…

Minutes later I came across a group of teenagers huddled by Edmonton Working Men's Conservative Club. Most of them were girls, and in a state of panic. I saw they were holding a topless boy, who looked about 17. "He's been stabbed," one said. As soon as he was in the ambulance, his friends fled, telling police they did not want to talk to "Feds" (slang for the police). One screamed: "We hate you." Another shouted: "You're the reason this is happening."