Longreads

Obama's CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell By Joshua Green June 14, 2012 6:00 AM EDT

One day in June, the better part of the U.S. Olympic rowing program flew to London for the Henley Royal Regatta in a sudden alpha-male rapture that left behind only the very young, the…

Image: democonference It's August 2011, and Andrew Mason is agitated. He's at his desk in the middle of Groupon's wide open, call center-style office in Chicago. His headphones…

One night around dinnertime, Kruse Wellwood sent an instant message to Kim Proctor. Hey, I thought you had babysitting, he wrote. Did you finish early? Gawky and boyish, 16-year-old Kruse had…

September 21, 2011 4:40 PM ET …

I wanted in. So I did what you might expect an over-enthusiastic suburban nitwit to do, and asked my mom to drive me to the mall to buy Ivor Horton's 1,181-page, 4.6-pound Beginning Visual C++ 6. I imagined myself working montage-like through the book, smoothly accruing expertise one chapter at a time. What happened instead is that I burned out after a week.

Last May, US Representative Newt Gingrich stood in the well of the House to rebut charges made by Speaker Tip O'Neill. For months, Gingrich had been harassing the Democrats in evening speeches broadcast over C-Span, the cable channel that carries House sessions.

On the 25th anniversary of "Licensed to Ill," an oral history of the birth of the Beastie Boys. "Then we were like, 'Oh, shit, we should get a D.J.! Like rap groups. They have a D.J.!' Nick Cooper knew about this guy Rick Rubin who went to NYU and would throw parties and had turntables. And a bubble machine. We were like, 'If we had a fucking D.J. and a fucking bubble machine, we’d be fucking killing it.'"