Longreads

Underground art in Beijing depicting Guy Fawkes. Photo by Chris Kealy At a teeming intersection of Shenzhen’s Dongmen shopping street, between KFC and McDonald’s, Liu Zhongqiu,…

Getty Images The best type of advertising," said Mark Zuckerberg in his company's first earnings call with Wall Street analysts in late July, "is a message from a friend." One of…

It wasnt really a pretty night, Rachel Chandler recalled. Small, sloshing waves were coming from the southeast, and a trickle of wind blew from the southwest. There…

These studies help explain why teens behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday. Along with lacking experience generally, they're still learning to use their brain's new networks. Stress, fatigue, or challenges can cause a misfire. Abigail Baird, a Vassar psychologist who studies teens, calls this neural gawkiness—an equivalent to the physical awkwardness teens sometimes display while mastering their growing bodies. The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren't done! You can see it right there in the scans!

The list of politicos laid low by sexual scandal grows ever longer. It hasnt always been this way. Fifty years ago, the press famously considered politicians sex lives off-limits, however…

Last week, I was in Atlanta for a day. I went directly from the airport to meet Congressman John Lewis at the King Center, where he and I were to be filmed for a program that Henry Lewis…

So, I find myself wondering, what am I going to do about the man who I think plagiarized me? Sue him? I’ve bleated to a few lawyers. Humiliate him in front of his editor? I’ve written her. Shame him? I’m writing this. My anger has the evanescence of an ephemeral stream. It dries up, then it comes gushing up in a basement two blocks away.

Elizabeth Hardwick and the whale: although it is very dark inside the whiteness, she will read her way by oil lamp to Melville, “the most bookish of writers, a tireless midnight student.” Thigh-high in ambergris and spermaceti, she makes herself as much at home as on the prison ship, or the cannibal islands, or the Berkshire farm where Herman wrote in twelve-hour shifts, or inside the Manhattan townhouse down whose stairs he may have tossed his wife.

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life.