Automattic

Inside the offices—and servers—of the video streaming empire: “On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around 10 p.m. in each time zone, at which point a […]

Two sisters are helping police track down their father, who abused them and murdered their mother and younger sister in the 1980s: “DNA analysis quickly confirmed that Gloria’s mother, Nilsa Padilla, was the murder victim known for decades as “Theresa Torso.” Gloria’s father, Jorge Walter Nuñez, instantly became the only suspect. For Miami-Dade police, it […]

From the late Marjorie Williams, the story of her own mother’s life and death: “It was only in secret that she was queen of her own domain. It was the land of late at night, when I would hear her downstairs, moving quietly around her kitchen, straightening a thing or two in the living room, […]

A mother hires a call girl for her son: My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother. My mother didn’t bother asking Danny for his permission before engaging Monique’s services. She didn’t ask my father to condone the transaction. Nor was she troubled by […]

A 1982 Inside Sports profile of Glenn Burke, one of the first professional athletes to come out. Burke died in 1995: “Burke walks out to the sunshine of the patio, where there is enough quiet to reflect. ‘People say I should still be playing,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, […]

Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn.

The writer on working for a chemical company and his suspicions that the chemicals were affecting his health: “The substance in question is quillaia bark. Quillaia bark is stripped from trees in Chile, bound by heavy wire in bundles the size of washing machines, loosely wrapped in coarse burlap, stacked on pallets, and dropped by […]

A brief history of the rock legend’s style and fashions: “Bowie’s image was as carefully contrived for album covers as for the actual musical performances: Sukita Masayoshi’s black-and-white photograph of Bowie posing like a mannequin doll on the cover of ‘Heroes’ (1977), or Bowie stretched out on a blue velvet sofa like a Pre-Raphaelite pinup […]

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” a personal story from GQ writer and National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello about a near-death experience. The piece was first published in GQ in 1995.

[Fiction, sci-fi] Death walks the streets of New York and ponders the Big Questions: “Death liked to walk across bridges. For this reason he had claimed a home for himself relatively far from the center of town. This was in a big ugly gray stone of a building that had once been a factory, and […]