Editor’s Pick

And so began the improbable last chapter in the fall of a major newspaper, as chronicled by O’Shea in The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. Among other things, the book is a reminder that whenever you think things can’t get worse, they can. They can get much, much […]

What ever happened to your signature laugh, by the way? I don’t laugh like that anymore, somehow it doesn’t come out. It’s weird to change something that’s as natural as that. But it started out as a real laugh, then it turned into people laughing because they thought my laugh was funny, and then there […]

I have covered Israeli hostage and M.I.A. cases for more than 15 years, including the covert ways in which Israel’s powerful espionage agencies operate to bring soldiers home alive or dead. Over that time, the issue has come to dominate public discourse to a degree that no one could have predicted. Israeli society’s inability to […]

Arbitrage is a risk-free way of making money by exploiting the difference between the price of a given good on two different markets—it’s the proverbial free lunch you were told doesn’t exist. In this equation, the undervalued good in question is hog meat, and McDonald’s exploits the value differential between pork’s cash price on the […]

[Not single-page] Still, a man who at 105—he’ll be 106 on December 19—has never had a life-threatening disease, who takes no cholesterol or blood-pressure medications and can give himself a clean shave each morning (not to mention a “serious sponge bath with vigorous rubbing all around”), invites certain questions. Is there something about his habits […]

They blindfolded us and stuffed us into a small sedan, three tall people with their hands bound behind them. This is what they mean by a “stress position,” I remember thinking. I don’t know how long that ride lasted—two hours, three?—but it seemed longer. The car’s sound system played a somber remix of Qaddafi’s famous […]

Back then, [Ali] had called Frazier an Uncle Tom, said he was much too ugly to be a champion and called him, on the occasion of their third fight, a gorilla. Frazier, unable to fight back verbally, for words were never among his weapons, remained hurt and bitter long after the fights were over. When […]

Since 2001, the bureau—often helped along by informants—has been instrumental in stopping at least 40 known terrorist plots, most of them smaller, “lone-wolf” schemes. Although it has faced some criticism for its activities and investigative techniques, the bureau’s post-9/11 record is remarkable, with no subsequent Al Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil. The person who came […]

It takes self-regard to name your company the Herminator Experience. It takes self-regard to go to a fancy dinner in Amsterdam with a group of colleagues from the National Restaurant Association and — well, let Biff Naylor, who was an N.R.A. officer at the time, explain: “We walk in, and the piano player is getting […]

Indeed, the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for […]