Longreads

An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government was opening his mail. Mazzini,…

We called him Eat Pray Paul. Because there were two Pauls and they were more or less indistinguishable — both red-faced old dudes who’d been kicking out Cambodia for years, smoking ice,…

To use a tennis analogy, I played all four corners in an attempt to interview clients. I hit up escort friends of mine with long-terms regulars, old clients who were articulate and thoughtful and…

Five years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobss eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy…

Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of “sites” with millions of “pages,” did not expect to be able to search for “Olympics” and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a problem. And what was a search supposed to produce for a word like “university”? AltaVista, then the leading search engine, offered up a seemingly unordered list of academic institutions, topped by the Oregon Center for Optics.

So it was, then, with great and satisfying surprise that almost immediately upon arriving at the party, I found myself locked in enthusiastic conversation in a corner with two other writers, all three of us, we discovered, solitary, isolated viewers of the NBC series Friday Night Lights. We spewed forth excitedly, like addicts—this was no longer a secret habit but a legitimately brilliant drama. Though the title might make the uninitiated think of shabbat candles, the show is actually about football in Texas, a state that I felt just then had not been this far east since the Bush administration.

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work. When a young man gets out of prison, society has an interest in keeping him out. Helping him to live a law-abiding life benefits…

To the Editors: It occurred to me that you might be interested in publishing the enclosed excerpts from the letter from Dr. Jack Kevorkian to Chief Justice William Rehnquist. (Im informed he sent…