Longreads

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country…

Miscellany — From the March 2013 issue By Andrew J. Bacevich Download Pdf MicroFiche

Open the neat spreadsheet and scroll past the listing of local developers, prominent attorneys, and personal trainers. You'll find a lengthy list of nicknames: Mostro, Al Capone, El Cacique, Samurai,…

Sarah and Jim, 1988 & 2011.For the past three years, Argentine photographer Irina Werning has been staging reenactments of old snapshots. The project, “Back to the Future,” includes…

On the set of "The Canyons" in Los Angeles last summer: Amanda Brooks, Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader. Lindsay Lohan moves through the Chateau Marmont as if she owns the place, but in a…

It remains nearly impossible for investors to understand what's going on inside the big banks—and what risks they're taking on:

"When we asked Dane Holmes, the head of investor relations at Goldman Sachs, why so few people trust big banks, he told us, 'People don’t understand the banks,' because 'there is a lack of transparency.' (Holmes later clarified that he was talking about average people, not the sophisticated investors with whom he interacts on an almost hourly basis.) He is certainly right that few students or plumbers or grandparents truly understand what big banks do anymore. Ordinary people have lost faith in financial institutions. That is a big enough problem on its own.

"But an even bigger problem has developed—one that more fundamentally threatens the safety of the financial system—and it more squarely involves the sort of big investors with whom Holmes spends much of his time. More and more, the people in the know don’t trust big banks either."

Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University history, in which nearly half the students taking a…

The story of Lost makes no sense. And by that I don't mean the story on the show — though this is the point where you can feel free to insert jokes about the numbers, the outrigger shootout,…

Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas by Paul McGeough Quartet, 477 pp, £25.00, May 2009, ISBN 978 0 7043 7157 6 In early September 1997, Danny Yatom,…