Longreads

Extinguishing Features The Last Years of Richard Pryor A genius self-destructs, with a little help from Hollywood Richard Pryor should have died on June 9, 1980. Early in the evening, out of his mind…

It was two weeks before Election Day when Mitt Romney’s political ­director signed a memo that all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his…

Illustration by Jason HolleyIt's late June in North Dakota, and Galen Grote and I are bouncing over his cattle ranch in a Chevy pickup with the radio tuned to "Hair Nation." Grote's vast fields of…

Wikimedia Commons, Seth Tisue/Flickr "I grew up on Ayn Rand," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) recounted in a

Rachel Maddow Virginia Sherwood/MSNBC "So just who is Sarah Palin?" This is Keith Olbermann talking, back in the summer of 2008, when the Alaska governor is brand-new to the national scene and…

In the past weeks, the fun has leached away. Readers and viewers who know Rupert Murdoch purely as a name—or as one of those figures so wealthy, and granted such frictionless mobility by their wealth, that they never seem to be in the part of the world that you expect them to be—were startled to see a senior gent, with sparse white hair and a clownish smile, descend upon London. He was seen jogging in one of the parks, in the thrall of a personal trainer. She was blond and wholly fearsome, like someone whom Sylvester Stallone very nearly married before changing his mind and hiding under the bed. As for her trainee, he was photographed with milk-white shanks exposed unkindly to the elements. This was Rupert Murdoch? The man to whom Prime Ministers bend the knee?