Editor’s Pick

[Fiction] A man and woman encounter each other every night in their dreams: “I said: ‘Sometimes in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing […]

How the down-on-its-luck city ended up becoming a stronghold for the Occupy movement–and whether the radicals will stick around when gentrification takes hold: “Their small capitalist enterprise — named to evoke the famous anti-capitalist tract — represents another side of Oakland, albeit one that’s still in its infancy. Think of it as a less twee, […]

After a couple has trouble having a second child, they turn to genetic screening and in vitro fertilization: “When I awoke, the embryologist relayed the excellent news: We had 20 eggs—five more than we thought possible. As soon as the April sunshine hit my face, I called my mom. Heath called his. For the first […]

How a collective of women in ski masks captured the attention of the world—and now face possible prison time for their stand against Putin: “At 9 p.m. on Thursday night, I’m at a rally of a couple of thousand anti-government protesters, hearing Pussy Riot’s name being chanted in the crowd, and I think I have […]

A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next: “My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here —he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do […]

The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin: “The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and […]

The hype and marketing behind the “fastest man in the world”: “It’s no surprise that every sports meeting in which he participates is organized around him. When he ran in Ostrava in the spring, there were posters featuring Bolt all over the Czech city, the stadium was sold out weeks ahead and there were young […]

A sitcom writer recalls a memorable meeting with Al Franken in the spring of 1998: “After a few moments the telephone rang at the host’s station, which sat in the lobby, a few feet outside the dining room entrance, and about 20 feet from where I was sitting. The host answered the call, listened for […]

[Not single-page] On the lives of three gay men who live as a “throuple”: “It is important, perhaps, that each pair within the throuple has a private bond: Jason and Adrian have their history, ­Jason and Benny work together, and ­Benny and Adrian are close in age. Benny tells me there is zero jealousy among […]

Alfred Hitchcock made Tippi Hedren into a star—and then sabotaged her career when she rejected his advances: “It started at the end of The Birds. To depict the notorious final sequence, when Melanie is attacked by dozens of birds on her own in an upstairs bedroom, Hedren was reassured that mechanical birds would be used. […]