Longreads

(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)   The mood was triumphant on the morning of July 21, 2010, when Barack Obama, not quite two years into his presidency, strode to a podium inside the Ronald…

Building Stories by Chris Ware Pantheon, 260 pp. boxed set, $50.00                                      …

President Obama saw it as a “50–50” proposition. Admiral Bill McRaven, mission commander, knew something would go wrong. So how did the raid that killed bin Laden get green-lighted? In an adaptation…

Every adult amateur knows how tough it can be to fit riding into a busy lifestyle. But the demands of Ann Romney’s schedule would make her fellow competitors’ collective heads spin.…

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…

The only reason that the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan gets to present his own federal budget, as though he were the shadow president and not a guy elected by roughly 180,000 people in and…

In 1959, when I was a precocious smarty-pants still in grade school, I wrote a fake letter to Doris Blake, the New York Daily News advice columnist. I pretended to be a teenage girl "in trouble." I…

On the morning of September 11, 2001, editors and designers at Esquire were making final changes to the…

When Tim Leary called and asked if I’d pick up Genesis P‑Orridge on my way down from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I knew enough to be afraid—but not a hell of a lot more. As founder of industrial music pioneer Throbbing Gristle and cult-inspiring acid-house follow-up Psychic TV, P‑Orridge was known for soliciting mail-in pubic hair and semen samples from his fans, tattooing his wife’s labia, and staging mock abortions on video. When those tapes were interpreted by clueless police as real satanic murder rituals, it became impossible for Genesis and his family to return to England without danger of imprisonment.