Longreads

A computer scientist goes all in for poker. Avi Rubin looks at his cards. Looks at his chips. Ponders his options. He has made it to the last table of a poker tournament at Delaware Park Casino, near…

Deee-Lite's Groove is in the Heart 'updated disco's gluttonous ultra-bright hedonism'. Photograph: Ian Dickson/Redferns Towards the end of Whit Stillman's 1998 movie The Last Days of Disco, Matt…

His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw…

Photo: Alcatel-Lucent Key figures: Ken Thompson [seated] types as Dennis Ritchie looks on in 1972, shortly after they and their Bell Labs colleagues invented Unix. They say that when one door closes…

The past year has been one of the strangest ever in the life of game designer, lecturer and author Ian Bogost. It started with the launch of the most successful game he's ever developed, and…

This is an edited transcript of a radio broadcast by Adrian Shaughnessy aired as part of the London-based radio station Resonance FMs Free University of the Airwaves. Shaughnessy had 30 minutes to…

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. #Sept11