The tragic end to Bruce Willis’ career — aphasia that challenges his speaking and cognition — shouldn’t befall anyone. Yet, as Matt Zoller Seitz points out in an incisive reading of the actor’s oeuvre, Willis long ago chose a path that would eerily presage his eventual diagnosis. You could say Willis’s career was never the […]
Peter Rubin
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Most Surveilled Place in America
Southwestern Arizona isn’t home to much in the way of urban development. Between Yuma and Tucson, there’s just a whole lot of Sonoran wilderness — the desolate territory migrants coming across the Mexican border have to navigate on their way to safety. But as Gaby Del Valle chronicles, the searing arid heat and unforgiving mountains […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sam Taggart’s Hard Sell
Door-to-door salespeople sound like an endangered, if not extinct, species. Brushes? Vacuums? Knives? Nope. Try home security systems and solar panels. In this wide-ranging and captivating piece, Tad Friend goes inside the current state of the “knocker” industry and comes out with a treasure trove of anecdotes and psychological insights. Schanz requires his execs to […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Code Snitching
In Nashville, it’s become all too common for homeowners to find themselves on the receiving end of spurious fines for alleged code violations — an unnerving pattern rooted in the city’s policies, and weaponized by disingenuous (and gentrifying) neighbors. Radley Balko investigates, in a long and damning feature that embodies exactly why local journalism is […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Neil Gaiman Knows What Happens When You Dream
Ahead of the Netflix adaption of his seminal comic book Sandman, Neil Gaiman gamely sits down for a longform Q&A. The results are as probing and patient and polymathic as you’d expect. I would love to think that we are living in a world in which the story of progress, as in the original “Star Trek” […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater
“[E]very so often, if you dig into a piece of internet ephemera, the context—the who, what, when, where, and why—have the potential to dramatically enhance your understanding of the freak accident that you just witnessed.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
I Woke Up With an Allergy to Cold
How can someone become allergic — full-on, allover hives allergic — to cold? This essay from Alison Espach unfolds like a slow walk along a precarious ridgeline: You feel the discomfort, but you also trust the journey enough to enjoy it. There’s a practiced sense of pace here, an easy deliberation that pairs well with […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs
As the drumbeat of psychedelic drugs’ therapeutic impact grows louder, it’s little surprise that companies are looking for new compounds that can rival psilocybin and LSD — while also being proprietary and patentable. Enter Compass Pathways and their star chemist, Jason Wallach. As John Semley reports for Wired, Wallach’s mad-scientist act is a childhood dream […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Welcome to Alphaland, the Disney World for Bodybuilders
Of the many species of internet entrepreneurship that preys on vanity and shame, “fitness influencer” might be one of the most fraught. Yet, that’s exactly who Christian Guzman is courting with his massive gym in the Houston exurbs. Emily McCullar investigates the Oiliest Place on Earth. The line to buy day passes was steady, and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Marvel Has a VFX Problem
If you’ve seen any of the recent movies coming out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you might have noticed something’s up — or, rather, down. That something is the quality of the visual effects: sometimes overdone, other times bordering on amateur. Don’t blame the artists, though; as Daniel Chin points out in this Ringer piece, Marvel […]