Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, believes that the United States was probably behind the cyberattack on Iran—and the U.S. is now vulnerable to having it turned back against it: ‘I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,’ he said calmly. This is a fairly astonishing statement […]
Longreads
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A former Major League Baseball No. 1 draft pick battles alcoholism. He’s now in jail, charged with three felonies: In a sport where alcohol plays such a massive part in all social settings—on the same day Bush was arrested, Boston reliever Bobby Jenks, another player with alleged alcohol issues, was charged with a hit-and-run DUI […]
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Confronting a letter writer who fears he may be too ugly for a romantic relationship: This, sweet pea, is where we must dig. You will never have my permission to close yourself off to love and give up. Never. You must do everything you can to get what you want and need, to find ‘that […]
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Life on the job with a team of nuclear divers. As nuclear power plants age, they require more upkeep—and much of that work can happen underwater: Last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear […]
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Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. This week: Tim Carmody examines Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Ketchup Conundrum,” which was originally published in The New Yorker’s Food Issue in Sept. 2004: Note: I can’t stand ketchup. Any ketchup. I think it’s disgusting, and always have. I was averse […]
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Memories of an early pioneer in New York public access television: By all accounts, public access television is dead, or dying, or just living an anonymous existence in the lesser-trolled channels of cable. But despite its decrepit state, I became mildly obsessed with, and then fully addicted to, The Grube Tube—a live talk show on […]
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Featured Longreader: Iain Manley, travel writer at Old World Wandering. See his story picks from SF Weekly, Al Jazeera English, The Daily Beast, plus more on his longreads page.
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Writer-director Lena Dunham is following her breakthrough, 2010’s Tiny Furniture, with a new HBO series produced with Judd Apatow. Inside the making of the series: “When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should […]
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“The most powerful newspaper in Great Britain.” A history of the Daily Mail, founded in 1896 as reading material “by office-boys for office-boys,” as a former prime minister said dismissively. Its daily readership is now four and a half million, and its website recently surpassed the New York Times in traffic, with 52 million unique […]
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[1934] A look back at the wine industry in the United States shortly after the end of Prohibition. Wine consumption was growing, but it was unclear whether American companies could compete: Since repeal became imminent the U.S. has been flooded with wine propaganda. In every metropolitan newspaper, experts have conducted daily columns on the art of […]