Longreads

RSS Feb 10 via

via cultfootball: afootballreport follows up on their excellent 2011 curation, this year compiled into a fancy pdf (“PDF in Browser | Download”):

RSS Dec 31

One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51,…

In November, 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reëlected in a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, taking forty-nine states and fifty-nine per cent of the popular vote. The Reagan revolution was…

In his State of the Union address two years ago, President Obama promised to double American exports over the next five years. At the time critics called this an unrealistic political promise, one…

On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning…

The transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race was nearly complete by late June, when she boarded a Dassault Falcon 900, in Dulles, Virginia, and headed toward the caucus grounds of Iowa. The leased, fourteen-seat corporate jet was to serve as Bachmann’s campaign hub for the next few days, and, before the plane took off, her press secretary, Alice Stewart, announced to the six travelling chroniclers that there was one important rule. “I know everything is on the record these days,” Stewart said, “but please just don’t broadcast images of her in her casual clothes."

Officially, Abdirizak Bihi is the director of the Somali Education and Special Advocacy Center, but in truth he is the center, aided only by a Samsung cellphone and a donated desk in the offices of Mo’s Building Maintenance. His program is part of an emerging movement that Washington officials refer to as “CVE,” or “countering violent extremism.” The idea is simple: Inoculate young Muslims against the risks of radicalization by making them feel entrenched and happy in their communities. The execution is much more complex.