Longreads

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely…

Once, people measured their leaders -- and themselves -- one clap at a time. The Dionysus Theater in Greece, from a German encyclopedia, 1891 (Wikimedia Commons) And then, suddenly, just when the…

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting…

A young man, depressed, desperate. In the North, it's too common. But the death of Julian Tologanak-Labrie was anything but. By Eva Holland. The verdict of the coroner’s jury is just three…

Excerpt from Robert Hughes’ cultural history of Rome, where he reminisces about his first visit to the city in 1959:

“First, the color, which was not like the color of other cities I had been in. Not concrete color, not cold glass color, not the color of overburned brick or harshly pigmented paint. Rather, the worn organic colors of the ancient earth and stone of which the city is composed, the colors of limestone, the ruddy gray of tufa, the warm discoloration of once-white marble and the speckled, rich surface of the marble known as pavonazzo, dappled with white spots and inclusions like the fat in a slice of mortadella. For an eye used to the more commonplace, uniform surfaces of 20th-century building, all this looks wonderfully, seductively rich.”

*A local farmer sells produce, in Santiago de Cuba (top);filling out a state store ration card (bottom) ore than a million Canadians will travel to Cub

By the time I arrived in Hamburg the fate of the financial universe seemed to turn on which way the German people jumped. Moodys was set to downgrade the Portuguese governments debt to junk-bond…