Editor’s Pick

The story of her father’s death ran in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles, detailing how a small band of men killed him, and how a mob mutilated his corpse. They called it a spectacle lynching, and historians say it was perhaps the worst act of torture and execution in 20th century America. The […]

Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has […]

From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam—shouting directives, excoriating every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing. She spent much of her career […]

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with […]

As US immigration policy has focused on deporting the greatest possible number of undocumented migrants, no matter what their situation, a great many Salvadoran deportees, some of whom grew up in the United States and hardly speak Spanish, have found themselves back in their country of birth. A number of these unwilling returnees are mareros, […]

Within the past five years, museums have returned to the Italian and Greek governments more than 100 artifacts worth nearly $1 billion. The Met gave back 21 pieces, including its celebrated Euphronios krater, a Greek vessel dating to about 515 B.C., which the museum had acquired in 1972 for a then-record $1 million. The Boston […]

In the weeks after Color’s belly flop last spring, friends and colleagues were concerned that Nguyen might be humiliated, or devastated, or at least very stressed out by the $41 million of venture money invested in his failed product. But Nguyen understands the arithmetic of Silicon Valley, and anyway he isn’t one to reflect. “I […]

From the start, the murder frustrated Abilene police. Eleven officers searched every room of Mary Eula’s house for clues, but all they found was the murder weapon, a bloody hunting knife that had no fingerprints on its ridged handle. Partly because the home’s ornately carved antique furniture had few smooth surfaces, only two usable fingerprints […]

This is mostly the truth. It was 1958 and Barbara Jean was 27 years-old. In Seattle, just before midnight she had a fight with my grandfather after returning from a summer party. Her three daughters all less than 8 years-old, were in bed when she retreated into the closet and as my copy of her […]

The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long […]