Longreads

Shane McAdams, "Synthetic Landscape 59 (Jaundiced Dusk)." Ball point pen, oil and resin on panel. 2012.  IT WAS AS IF GOD had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was…

The climb up the steel steps is dizzying--like ascending the tower of a European church, except the steps lead to a platform bolted to the side of a gleaming new chemical plant. Here in Brazil, under…

On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the

For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad.

Every American can be his own policeman; the country has nearly as many guns as it has people. Photograph by Christopher Griffith.