Longreads

The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma…

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF MUSIC about K-pop, the musical phenomenon which is sweeping Asia and may yet come to the West. Over the last two decades, South Korea, a country of around fifty million, has…

David Talbot | Photography by Peter Belanger | September 20, 2012 Shaken by the latest digital gold rush, San Francisco struggles for its soul.  Photo Illustration by Peter Belanger Last year,…

In exchange for leniency, untrained informants are sent out to perform dangerous police operations with few legal protections.

Why I’m leaving the country I loved. Mark Kitto and family; Photo: Eric Leleu Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never…

Meet Mat Honan. He just had his digital life dissolved by hackers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired. Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First…

Fresno was a mistake from the beginning. I was five when we moved there. My dad and I drove from Texas in a rented Ryder truck; we finally pulled off the highway in a dingy business district…

Every generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves. In 1937, at the height of the Depression, Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich,” which claimed to distill the principles that had made Andrew Carnegie so wealthy. “The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale, which was published in 1952, advised readers that techniques such as “a mind-emptying at least twice a day” would lead to success. By the seventies, Werner Erhard and est promised material wealth through spiritual enlightenment. The eighties and nineties saw management-consultancy maxims married with New Age thinking, with books such as Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” In the past decade or so, there has been a rise in books such as “Who Moved My Cheese?,” by Spencer Johnson, which promise to help readers maximize their professional potential in an era of unpredictable workplaces. Timothy Ferriss’s books appeal to those for whom cheese, per se, has ceased to have any allure.