Longreads

At exactly 10:53 p.m. on Saturday, November 5, 2011, Joe and Mary Reneau were in the bedroom of their whitewashed and brick-trimmed home, a two-story rambler Mary's dad custom-built 43 years ago.…

In the 1960s and '70s, towns across the South created inexpensive private schools to keep white students from having to mix with black. Many remain open, the communities around them as divided as…

Last Sunday, The New York Times published an op-ed by Garmin-Sharp manager Jonathan Vaughters in which he admitted to doping during his professional cycling career. In “How to Get Doping Out…

Rachel Maddow Virginia Sherwood/MSNBC "So just who is Sarah Palin?" This is Keith Olbermann talking, back in the summer of 2008, when the Alaska governor is brand-new to the national scene and…

President Barack Obama listens during one in a series of meetings discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. (Getty Images) Inspired by The…

Michael, a 9-year-old whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment, with his mother, Anne. One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael,…

by Sy Montgomery Published in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion magazine Photograph: Brandon Cole ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire…

Almost immediately after Steve Jobs announced he was stepping down as CEO of Apple, tributes to his technological vision and entrepreneurial flair began filling up the web. Jobs created an industry with the Apple II and reshaped another with the iPod. He made cyberspace tactile and dimensional with Macintosh and its graphical interface. Over the course of the last 40 years or so, Jobs has imagineered, packaged, and sold the future with a deftness and persistence few others have managed: Apple lists him as one of the inventors on an astounding 313 patents. But as impressive and wide-ranging as this record of achievement is — it includes designs for computers, keyboards, mice, user interfaces, media players, product packaging, and even a glass staircase — it fails to acknowledge his greatest, most influential innovation of all: Steve Jobs invented business casual.

From Cairo to London to Brooklyn, too many young people are jobless and disaffected. Inside the global effort to put the next generation to work Cairo, Egypt: A cloud of tear gas drives…