Longreads

A scene from “Bernie,” with Shirley MacLaine as Marge, and Jack Black as Bernie. “Bernie,” the new film from

It was one of the most ambitious computer product announcements in history. On April 2, 1987, at twin press conferences in New York and Miami, IBM unveiled its plans to reinvent the PC industry…

On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didnt check her email until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to sleep, rather than…

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers. For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.

Everyone knows Roald Dahl's last novel Matilda, his seemingly pro-female examination of a talented young girl oppressed by the provincialism of her parents. What they usually do not know is that the original draft of the book painted the protagonist as a devilish little hussy who only later becomes "clever", perhaps because she found herself without very much to do after torturing her parents. Dahl's editor Stephen Roxburgh completely revised Dahl's last novel and, in doing so, turned it into his most popular book.

In 1955 "Rock Around the Clock" went to the top of the charts and turned Bill Haley into the king of rock and roll. Twenty-five years later, he was holed up in a pool house in Harlingen, drunk, lonely, paranoid, and dying. After three decades of silence, his widow and his children tell the story of his years in Texas and his sad final days.