Longreads

On May 12, 2008, Hu Shuli, the founding editor of the biweekly magazine Caijing, was hosting a ceremony for scholarship recipients at a hotel in the mountains west of Beijing. When a text message…

First it was Lubriderm, what my father rubbed briskly between his palms and extended in glistening offering. “How about a bit of the Lube?” he’d say when I walked into his…

Bourdin once wrote, “When you fight monsters, be careful that . . . you do not become one.” Photograph by François-Marie Banier. On May 3, 2005, in France, a man called an…

Jonathan Franzen: hard-won knowledge. Photograph: Chris Buck for the Guardian I'm going to begin by addressing four unpleasant questions that novelists often get asked. These questions are apparently…

Looking back on Hunter S. Thompson's classic work of gonzo journalism:

"The telephone rang at Warren Hinckle's San Francisco home at about 3:30 in the morning on Wednesday, April 29, 1970. When Hinckle picked up the receiver, he heard the unmistakable voice of Hunter S. Thompson, calling from Aspen, proclaiming, "Goddammit, Scanlan's has to cover the Derby. It's important."

The pitch, even at the late hour and the late date (barely 72 hours before the race itself), was fairly irresistible.1 Send Thompson, still finding his distinctive voice in countercultural journalism, to his hometown of Louisville to cover the drunken, debauched scene at Churchill Downs for Scanlan's, the anti-establishment (some would say subversive) monthly magazine for which Hinckle was co-editor.

Hinckle agreed on the spot, booked Thompson a ticket, wired him expense money, and then set about finding an artist to provide illustrations for the story. Originally, he had hoped to send a photographer to shoot the event, but after haggling with Thompson, he instead hired the English illustrator Ralph Steadman."

It was a simple plan. McDonald’s would pay to appear at the top of the trends list on Twitter’s home page, using the social-media site to drive people to its new commercials highlighting some of the…

Few medicines, in the history of pharmaceuticals, have been greeted with as much exultation as a green-and-white pill containing 20 milligrams of fluoxetine hydrochloride — the chemical we know as…

Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no…

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