Longreads

Illustrations by Steve Brodner"There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is."—Mark Hanna, 19th-century mining tycoon and…

By having the case reargued, Roberts put the liberals in a box and transformed the decision’s impact on political campaigns.

After losing her Florida home to foreclosure in 2009, Sheila Ramos has made a home for her family on a patch of rural land on Hawaii's Big Island. (Paul Kiel/ProPublica) Note: This story is not…

Photo by Jana Birchum Last year on Aug. 28, eight Austin activists traveled north in a rented…

In other countries, people might want to put more distance between themselves and the source of the radiation, but this is difficult on a crowded archipelago with a rigid job market. Thousands have fled nonetheless, but most people in the disaster area will have to stay and adjust. Doing so would be easier if there were clear guidance from scientists and politicians, but here, too, contemporary Japan seems particularly vulnerable. The country has just got its seventh prime minister in five years. Academia and the media have been tainted by the powerful influence of the nuclear industry. As a result, a notoriously conformist nation is suddenly unsure what to conform to. "Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them – Japanese people are not good at that," says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan's leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the physical impact.

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishus Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks…

Economic Scene The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief…

Phillip Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. "It's one of those things that the public just takes for granted," he says. "The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and that's it." He is struck by how many USPS executives started out as letter carriers or clerks. He finds them so consumed with delivering mail that they have been slow to grasp how swiftly the service's financial condition is deteriorating. "We said, 'What's your 10-year plan?' " Herr recalls. "They didn't have one."