Longreads

The island, named Utøya, pokes out of a glacial lake called Tyrifjorden twenty-five miles west of Oslo. It slopes up steeply from the jetty, and Adrian is at the top of the hill, near the…

Fiona Apple was upstairs, alone, stalking the small suite of her boutique hotel in Soho. It was noon, in May, and she had arrived in New York, the city where she grew up, a few days earlier from…

What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend?In an essay he published in The New York Times in 1981, the writer Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced…

Back in my blunted-out days in high school, I played in one of those coed softball leagues for which the sole purpose is to provide an outlet for parking lot drinking, revealing costumes, and the…

Trent Arsenault was in the Borg Cube when he heard the knock. “Trent,” his father called through the door. The Borg, tucked into a canyon southeast of San Francisco, consists of a modest…

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

So the way my father used to tell it, my parents second date went something like this: My father was positively smitten after his blind date with my mother, and wanting to spend as much time with…

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the cloudremote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and…