Longreads

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I. In June of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published his essay "Wealth" in the North American Review: a famous document, as remarkable for the author’s delusional self-regard as it is for the case he…

"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece together [his actions]?"  (Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty…

So the way my father used to tell it, my parents second date went something like this: My father was positively smitten after his blind date with my mother, and wanting to spend as much time with…

August 18, 2011Plenty of family dollarsThe historic Thirgood Memorial CME Church, located for the past 44 years in Smithfield just a block from Legion Field, has existed as a congregation in…

Kate…

I was calling Sleets because I wanted to talk to the man who invented the high five. I'd first read about him in 2007 in a press release from National High Five Day, a group that was trying to establish a holiday for convivial palm-slapping on the third Thursday in April. Apparently, Sleets had been reluctantly put in touch with the holiday's founders, and he explained that his father, Lamont Sleets Sr., served in Vietnam in the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry -- a unit nicknamed The Five. The men of The Five often gathered at the Sleets home when Lamont Jr. was a toddler. They'd blow through the front door doing their signature greeting: arm straight up, five fingers spread, grunting "Five." Lamont Jr. loved to jump up and slap his tiny palms against their larger ones. "Hi, Five!" he'd yell, unable to keep all their names straight.

Alongside the world's tallest free-standing tower, one of the world's tiniest pop stars is crouched next to a garbage pail, collecting a pile of eyeliner pencils and mascara tubes between her hands. While Amy Winehouse wanders the courtyard of Toronto's 1,815-foot CN Tower in search of a plastic bag to hold her cosmetics, the man who was her fiancé on that May but who would be her husband five days later smokes a cigarette from my pack and looks bored. Blake Fielder-Civil — or "Baby," as Winehouse calls him, in an array of inflections that strains imagination — gestures toward the trash can. Her soda spilled inside her fake Louis, he says, pointing at the beaten-up mock Lois Vuitton purse atop the rubbish. "She had that bag for ages."

As the U.S. economy fails to recover, there is a growing fear that the United States has entered a phase of long-term decline. Conservatives blame big government for throttling entrepreneurship;…