Longreads

On the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup, flickered through a complicated sequence of emotions: hatred, fear, anger, doubt. “Cut!” Lana Wachowski shouted. The crew on Stage 9 at…

Let us begin with a few suggested definitions. 1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: I am rereading and never I am reading . This at least happens among those who…

For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad.

Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

At The New Yorker, we have a tradition called “weekend reading.” Every Friday afternoon, a stack of manuscripts arrives in your office or inbox—wonderful works of fiction,…

Thelonious Monk and Nica de Koenigswarter at the Five Spot jazz club, New York, 1964: 'She’s in love with him: the way she gazes at him… but I don’t believe that sex was at the heart of it.'…

Every American can be his own policeman; the country has nearly as many guns as it has people. Photograph by Christopher Griffith.

On Thursday, January 19th, the front page of the Daily Mail carried a story about Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. During Goodwin’s tenure, from 2000…

May 12, 2008