Automattic

Gay Talese’s classic 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra with annotations from the author: “The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking […]

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Two years before the president’s assassination, Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey initiated a public showdown with Kennedy during what was supposed to be a friendly luncheon with Texas newspaper publishers. The story is documented in the new book Dallas 1963: “Dealey can’t stand it. Leaning forward, half out of his seat, he suddenly interrupts […]

Awkward, grumpy interview with the legendary Cream drummer: “Are you living in England now? 

 Yes. That’s where I am right now. You just phoned me so you know that this is an English phone number. “I know, I just wanted to ask. Well why ask me questions if you know the answer?”

CBC reporter Mellissa Fung was kidnapped, stabbed, and thrown down a hole outside Kabul where she spent 28 days in captivity. Five years later, she returned to Afghanistan: “Back at home after my ordeal, I refused to let my nightmares rise out of the darkness. I took on the cause of wounded soldiers as a […]

Gay teens in Georgia are being expelled from private Christian schools that are using a local law to raise money in a way that is so shrouded in mystery that the Society of Professional Journalists has awarded the law the Black Hole Award, for “the most heinous violations of the public’s right to know”: “Now […]

From Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, a new collection of essays edited by Sari Botton: “I wouldn’t miss the culture; New York winnows out a lot of mediocrity, but I was only interested in heroin at that moment in time, of which, I admit, New York did have the very best, […]

In an excerpt from his new book The Everything Store, Brad Stone explores how Jeff Bezos turned Amazon into an online retailing giant—and tracks down Bezos’s biological father: “I found Ted Jorgensen, Jeff Bezos’s biological father, behind the counter of his bike shop in late 2012. I’d considered a number of ways he might react […]

On the genius of Cal Worthington, the legendary Southern California car dealer and TV pitchman who died Sept. 8 at age 92: “Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through […]

An excerpt from the new book Wheelmen, on the doping scandal that brought down Lance Armstrong, and a scene from the 2004 Tour de France: “But soon, Landis said, everyone on board realized what was happening. The bus was being transformed into a secret blood transfusion unit. “The riders had known they would be asked […]