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Former WWF wrestler Diamond Dallas Page is now a fitness guru who is helping other former wrestlers like Jake “The Snake” Roberts with their substance abuse addictions. Page’s home in Smyrna, Ga. has been dubbed by these wrestlers as the “Accountability Crib”: “Page has a knack for bringing people under his influence. Linda is actually […]

Secret Service agent Mike Adams used the identity of a grifter named Justin Todd Moss to sell criminals fake IDs and build a case against them. The story behind the Secret Service’s long con: “From the Secret Service’s standpoint, selling fake IDs – ‘novelties,’ in the parlance of the underground – would have held a […]

“Monsanto’s specialty is killing stuff.” A brief, outraged history of how the biotech giant took control of the world’s food supply, from pesticides to genetically modified crops. The promise was that GM crops would mean cheaper food around the world, but patents allowed the company to muscle out competitors, fend of regulators and steer the […]

At the height of her fame, “The Lottery” writer Shirley Jackson’s life was falling apart. Victoria Best chronicles the author’s personal pain as she finished her 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle: “For some time, Jackson had been battling serious health issues: she was morbidly obese, suffering from asthma, arthritis and the […]

Via Travelreads: Chris Jones on the unique culture of Japanese baseball and 16-year-old pitching phenom Tomohiro Anraku, seen as “a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations”: “There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of […]

The population of nuns in the United States has dwindled to less than 60,000, and just 12% of them are under the age of 60. With convents closing down, sisters are left to fend for themselves: The Catholic Church covers retirement funds for priests, “the sisters have no such safety net. When their orders run […]

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “The Prophet,” the much-talked-about new story from Luke Dittrich and Esquire magazine investigating the claims made by Dr. Eben Alexander in the best-selling book Proof of Heaven, about Alexander’s own near-death experience. Dittrich, a contributing editor at Esquire since 2008, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past and his work has […]

A short essay/instructional guide on how managers can use “microaggressions” against their team “to reinforce destructive power dynamics, justify inequality in the workplace, submerge conflict, construct false superiority/entitlement and maintain control over employees”: “Commonly, there is a huge inequality in the accountability that employees have to managers vs. the accountability managers have to employees. There […]

According to a lawsuit, Harper Lee’s agent Samuel Pinkus duped the To Kill a Mockingbird author to assign him the copyright to her only book. An investigation into Lee’s fight to regain the book’s copyright, which continues to earn millions of dollars in royalties: “His first move was to obtain the copyright to To Kill […]

We’ve witnessed more than two centuries of unprecedented economic growth, powered by two industrial revolutions from the 1700s to today. Robert Gordon, a 72-year-old economist at Northwestern, argues that this incredible period of growth was all a fluke—and we are entering a new era where there’s no guarantee our children will be any better off […]