Longreads

For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses…

On Australia's Garry White:

"Three times a year, Alan told us, “this bloke Garry” pulls his full-size tractor-trailer rig out of Cairns and heads up the peninsula to the fuel depot at Weipa. There, he fills the tanker with diesel for the cattle stations and aboriginal settlements in the distant north, and for Pajinka. The 2,400 km round trip—very little of it on paved roads—takes him through the continent’s most inaccessible wilderness. He has to plow through jungle rivers, chain-saw through downed trees and shovel his way out of truck-gobbling mud holes. Every time he stops to change a flat tire or replace an axle, he’s bait for leeches, wild boars, taipans and giant crocs.

“It’s a well-known fact,” said Alan, “that he is the world’s toughest trucker.”

Flying the black flag: Jihadi fighters manning a checkpoint at the town of Azzan in south Yemen. The region of newly proclaimed jihadi emirates is run by affiliates of al-Qaida in the Arabian…

Evolution's It Girl: In 1993, Margie Profet received a MacArthur "Genius" grant tor her work in Evolutionary Biology. She was 34. Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions.  A…

It started when the News of the World hacked into the voice mails of the British royal household, in 2005, touching off a scandal that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—and, apparently, the British authorities—tried to contain. After a score of lawsuits and new arrests, the cover-up is falling apart.

Coming soon to walrusmagazine.com: should we decriminalize polygamy? an online exclusive

George R. R. Martin has now sold more than fifteen million books worldwide, and his readership will likely multiply exponentially after the launch, this month, of "Game of Thrones," a lavish HBO series based on "A Song of Ice and Fire." He is committed to nurturing his audience, no matter how vast it gets. "It behooves a writer to be good to his fans," he says. Still, a close relationship with one’s audience has its drawbacks. As Martin puts it, "The more readers you have, the harder it is to keep up, and then you can’t get any writing done."

Beneath the well-chronicled narrative of garment industry decline I began to see another set of truths: that the garment industry is still New York City’s largest manufacturing sector by employment; that the production, service, and supply businesses that remain play a vital, if underappreciated, role in the larger fashion industry of New York; and that even with the emergence of instant communications and far-flung supply chains—not to mention the pressures exerted by landlords looking to convert industrial space into more profitable offices—there are still compelling reasons why this industrial network continues to cluster in midtown Manhattan.

The American Society of Magazine Editors has named ProPublicas Robin Fields and her piece, God Help You. Youre on Dialysis, a finalist for the 2011...