Longreads

print A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. And I like Jet Blue, not just because of the prices. They have this terminal at JFK that I think is really nice. I think…

Weekend Reading: a weekly column of my favorite long magazine stories from the past week. They’re also often collected on twitter and Longreads.com. (Read the last three here, here, and here.)…

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H ot Sauce Committee Part Two , out May 3, is, according to the Beastie Boys, a return to their fundamental smartassery after 2004 s uncharacteristically serious To the 5 Boroughs, which was, in…

In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his…

Writer Jessica Lussenhop: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011 Jessica Lussenhop is a staff writer for the Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages. See her stories on her Longreads page or find her on…

It's a glorious thing, hearing Eddie Murphy say "fuck" again. Few people ever said it better – and down here in the basement of the stone-and-marble mansion he built on a Beverly Hills cliff, it's coming from his lips often enough to make Shrek blush. "Come on, motherfucker," Murphy shouts, over the throb of James Brown's "Hot Pants" on a formidable sound system.

The motherfucker in question is a bowling ball, which is speeding down the center of one of the two polished lanes of the alley Murphy keeps here, along with an arcade full of video games and a blue-lit "club room," inspired by a similar space in his new friend Brett Ratner's house. Hanging in a corner, above an electric keyboard, is Ernie Barnes' iconic painting Sugar Shack – as seen on the cover of Marvin Gaye's I Want You and in the opening credits of Good Times. It is, of course, the original.

LAURIE WINER on the dismantling of a once great newspaper.James OSheaThe Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers PublicAffairs Books,…

Steve Jobs introduced the new iPhone 4 in San Francisco in 2010.