Longreads

It’s nearly midnight on the broad hill called Firmihin, where a dragon’s blood forest grows. The moon, a night past full, floods the jagged landscape with cool silver. Inside the rock…

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in…

For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon—honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth—it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate “wars” that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation.

As America's nuclear power plants have aged, the once-rural areas around them have become far more crowded and much more difficult to evacuate. Yet government and industry…

On the cut-and-kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs,…

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Illustrations by Jesse Lenz(Photo: Noah Addis/The Star-Ledger (Bergrin); Stephen Mulcahey/Alamy (gunmen); Getty Images (briefcase); Ian Marlow/Alamy (police car); Izmostock/Alamy (Bentley); Getty…

Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice,” or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle.

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has a new project. ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates