Longreads

We buried my grandfather last spring. He had died in his sleep in his own bed at 95, so, as funerals go, it wasn’t a grim occasion. But it was a historic one for our small rural…

[For Part 1, click here][For Part 2, click here] HEARTBEAT Over the next few months, everything was fine, her illness in partial remission. Although she refused to attend Alcohol Anonymous meetings,…

After decades of misguided hysteria, the War on Drugs may have an epidemic worth freaking out about, and it's spreading across state and demographic lines at the speed of the Internet. NATASHA…

Of all the opponents that the legendary astronomer Johannes Kepler ever faced during his eventful life,  the one  he could never quite beat had to have been his own mother. Born in 1546 in…

...[T]his involved a young executive called John Kaye, who was installed in the second season by the network with some fanfare, supposedly to give the Smothers Brothers a more sympathetic ear in…

THE OLD NARRATIVE EXPLAINING CALIFORNIA design is roughly this: European Moderns planted the seeds of an avant-garde, technology-based design community when they arrived in California in the 1920s…

How Mexican food became more American than apple pie:

"There is nothing remotely Mexican about Potato Olés—not even the quasi-Spanish name, which has a distinctly Castilian accent. The burrito was more insulting to me and my heritage than casting Charlton Heston as the swarthy Mexican hero in Touch of Evil. But it was intriguing enough to take back to my hotel room for a taste. There, as I experienced all of the concoction’s gooey, filling glory while chilly rain fell outside, it struck me: Mexican food has become a better culinary metaphor for America than the melting pot."

"That you have a nation (and increasingly a planet—you can find Mexican restaurants from Ulan Bator to Sydney to Prague) lusting after tequila, guacamole, and tres leches cake isn’t an exercise in culinary neocolonialism but something closer to the opposite. By allowing itself to be endlessly adaptable to local tastes, Mexican food has become a primary vehicle for exporting the culture of a long-ridiculed country to the far corners of the globe. Forget Mexico’s imaginary Reconquista of the American Southwest; the real conquest of North America is a peaceful and consensual affair, taking place one tortilla at a time."

Some insight into the workings of the newly-opened Associated Press bureau in North Korea:

"North Korea remains the world's most opaque country, in part because of the difficulty foreign journalists have working there. "It's unique in having walled itself off for so long," says Mike Chinoy, a former senior Asia correspondent for CNN who has visited North Korea 15 times. "Therefore the mere fact of a decision [to allow the opening of a bureau] must have been taken at a very high level, and to me that is very encouraging."

"AP's investment in opening a bureau in North Korea might ultimately pay off in having people in place if the country collapses. Beck thinks AP's motivation is the same as that of any foreign company trying to operate in North Korea. "First movers have the advantage," he says. (Daniszewski responds, "We don't predict events, but it's always better to have someone there to witness whatever should happen in the country.") When crisis hits North Korea, AP has "a foot in the door, so to say, and that is good," says Lankov. "But simply don't expect muckraking reports about Kim's family finances or interviews with closet dissenters."

Why were so many prominent modernist writers and philosophers attracted to fascist or authoritarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century? A list of those who were not—Samuel…