Longreads

I pitched three years in the minor leagues for the Milwaukee Braves and I never pitched a “Big Game,” like the deciding game of a league championship, my 20th victory on the last day of…

Tornadoes are measured by the strength of the wind they produce. After a storm, meteorologists, weather researchers, and civil engineers will examine the field of damage and make a determination…

“WHAT'S THAT CRAZY GUY UP TO NOW?”It was amazing and almost reassuring to hear photographer Luis Escobar now sounding so calm and lighthearted, because his first reaction when he heard…

Posted a few minutes ago Lately, we like reading long things that are not books. A lot, it seems. There are apps for reading them: Instapaper, Read It Later, Readability. Platforms…

As chosen by Brendan I. Koerner A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan…

by Joe Kloc The Atavist No. 12, February 2012 Joseph Gutheinz is on a mission to save the moon. Decades ago, astronauts brought back 850 pounds of rocks from their lunar journeys; the U.S. gave…

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy's brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as "Young Rabbit," or even "Rabbit"; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. The little boy didn't know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray.

There's a moment in Jim Corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which is unquestionably the greatest book ever written about hunting man-killing tigers in India,1 when the author encounters a snake. It's a big snake, a king cobra, 13 or 14 feet long, and Corbett is alone, deep in the forest, tracking some fearsome jungle cat. The snake is drinking from a pool of water, and when it sees Corbett it raises its head two or three feet in the air and looks at him. "It was the most beautiful snake I had ever seen," Corbett writes. "The throat, as it faced me, was a deep orange red shading to golden yellow where the body met the ground."

Never, it seems, have punters been more valuable to NFL teams. So who are these guys—and why hasn't a single punter been voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame?