Longreads

Anthony Shadid, a prize-winning foreign correspondent, died at the age of 43 in Syria, while reporting for the New York Times. A beloved and brilliant writer, Shadid spent his two-decade career…

Image: Photograph by Dan Saelinger In Brief The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to…

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. DB here: As the final credits rolled, a man behind me blurted out, “I don’t get it.” He’s not alone. Kristin and some acquaintances have told me…

Behind the security bars of a spartan, white-tiled room, 25 youths are arranging bedrolls on the floor. The workers on the Salvation Army nightshift, who watch over these lone foreign teenagers in a…

On December 10, 1810, in a muddy field around 25 miles from London, a fight took place that was so dramatic, controversial, and ferocious that it continues to haunt the imagination of boxing more…

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it's true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and…