Longreads

Trevell Coleman wasn’t sure whether he’d killed a man. But after seventeen years, he needed to find out. New York | November 18, 2012 LATE ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 15, 2010, Trevell…

Ignore the tedious pundits bloviating about shrunken attention spans. There has never been a better time to immerse yourself in long, deep, rich science reporting. Here’s a list of my 12 top…

At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to—only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes—though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.

On April 20, 2005, George W. Bush signed into law a bankruptcy bill that had been pending in Congress for eight years. The bill was written by credit-industry lobbyists, shopped to their friends in Congress, and supported by tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions. It might be dismissed as just one more piece of highly focused special-interest legislation except for the damaging vision of middle-class America that it reinforced: irresponsible people consumed by appetites for goods they don’t need, who think little of cost, and who would rather file for bankruptcy than repay their lawful debts.

May/June 2011 The Information Sage Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data. By Joshua…