Longreads

I liked the look of Palawan on a map — the sausagey shape of it, the way it linked Indonesia to the Philippines, its great distance away, its apparent insignificance, its only one town-dot of…

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet…

Mary Beard W hen the ancient geographer Strabo described the native inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, he listed – with a predictable combination of relish, horror and exaggeration –…

A network of pitchmen have used the internet and fear of a failing economy to play the ultimate long con On a warm summer day in 2002, in Charlevoix, Michigan, Richard Joseph’s bad luck began.…

Note: This is a single-page version of this article. If you would like to comment on the article, please return to the main version. Thank you. IPOs are wildly profitable deals for Wall Street…

There are cowboys with brown teeth and black hats in southeastern Idaho who tell you the French are just as good sons-of-bitches as you’re likely to find anywhere. They mean this as a…

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Peter Stark on the ups and downs of his family's move to Brazil for one year:

"That moment became emblematic of our year in Brazil: difficult yet welcoming. Unfamiliar yet warm. Emotionally exhausting yet richly rewarding. We found a cramped three-room ridgetop house, its front door opening onto a small plaza and, out the back window, a world-class view high over the river. Each of us met the experience in our own way—some more easily than others. Skyler’s year started downhill, with that ambulance ride, and kept going south, with his first day in Brazilian seventh grade as an acutely self-conscious, blond-haired, blue-eyed 12-year-old sporting a Frankenstein set of stitches under a baseball cap. At first, without any Portuguese, he had no idea if the other kids were laughing at him or befriending him. Most likely, in Brazil, it was some of both. He came to dread sitting four hours each day in the noisy, tiled classroom, although his Catholic school, Colégio Imaculada Conceição, was only 100 yards from our door."

A magnetogram recorded at the Greenwich Observatory in London during the Carrington Event of 1859. Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy…