Automattic

The writer meets with a surviving Branch Davidian, 20 years after a fire that killed cult leader David Koresh and 73 of his followers: “Was it his good looks? His guitar? The fact that he had memorized so much of the Bible? “‘I don’t know that he was a very talented con man,’ Doyle said. […]

The writer visits a taxidermy shop to purchase a Valentines’s Day gift. This essay will be included in David Sedaris’s new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls: “The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a […]

A profile of rock star David Lee Roth, who has had a diverse career and life. He’s now 57 years old and back doing shows with Van Halen: “He eventually became a certified EMT in New York and then completed a tactical medicine training program in Southern California. Not famous enough to headline Madison Square […]

The author recalls a childhood summer in the New Jersey countryside in 1939 before World War II: “Toward evening, after we had showered and changed, we could hear grown-up voices rising and falling in contention. Whenever any of us would come near, they’d stop talking and pretend they hadn’t been arguing, but we could feel […]

From the author of the new novel All That Is, a 1975 profile of Vladimir Nabokov that he wrote for People Magazine: “The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look […]

How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks: “You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in […]

The dead body of 55-year-old Greg Fleniken is found in a hotel room, and with no clear motive, detectives are left trying to answer the all-important question: Why? “There are not that many murders in Beaumont. Greg’s was one of 10 that year, which was about average. Most are not mysterious. Detective work was usually […]

A writer looks for a balance between creative ambition and financial security: “I recently asked my dad if he ever regretted not following those early ambitions. No, he told me. Even though he’d toyed with doing a more commercial craft like silversmithing or pottery, he realized how hard a life that would be, always having […]

NASA built a satellite designed to track global warming. It never launched, and more than a decade later, it sits in a box in Maryland: “It has never become entirely clear why the satellite had ended up here. In his 2009 book Our Choice, Gore wrote, ‘The Bush Cheney administration canceled the launch within days […]

[Fiction] A woman struggles to deal with personal problems: “My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. I never understood the nuns. […]