Longreads

[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street's business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching:

"For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. 'After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?' an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. 'I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.' 'If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,' says a hedge-fund executive. 'You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.'"

On Monday afternoon, March 28, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes summoned Glenn Beck to a meeting in his office on the second floor of News Corp.’s midtown headquarters to discuss his future at the network. Ailes had spent the better part of the weekend at his Putnam County estate thinking about how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Glenn Beck, the situation was a mess, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session.

His falling-out with the White House was a dramatic reversal for Orszag, his first real career stumble. Looking back, Orszag now says he didn’t even want the job. “I didn’t want to do it,” he told me. “Having worked in a White House before, I knew how the infighting can become all-­consuming, and I didn’t want to fall into that trap again. Many of my mentors warned me that despite the ‘no drama’ Obama campaign, once in office this White House would inevitably be like others—and possibly worse. And unfortunately that’s exactly what happened.”

With his leering coverage of Brett Favre's penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan's foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?

The loud, cartoonish blood sport that's engorged MSNBC, exhausted CNN -- and is making our body politic delirious.

[Not single-page] Sarah Palin is already president of right-wing America -- and it’s a position with a very big salary.

Taking on the Times, Google, and, in a sense, his own children, Rupert Murdoch is not going gently into the night.

Inside the messy collapse of a great newspaper.

Since his final at-bat, on September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds has been living in near total seclusion. He’s made only a handful of public appearances and declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story. But from more than thirty conversations with his friends, former teammates, agents, and baseball insiders, a portrait of Bonds in hiding emerges. He’s at an inflection point between his baseball past and an uncertain future. On many days, he enjoys his involuntary retirement and the privacy it affords him. But part of Bonds still desperately wants to play. He looks around, sees a sport that’s lousy with known juicers, and can’t comprehend why no one will make him an offer, even for the league minimum of $400,000 a year.