Editor’s Pick

(Overseas Press Club Award Winner, 2011.) On the morning before I arrived in Zitácuaro, a beautiful hill town in the western Mexican state of Michoacán, the dismembered body of a young man was left in the middle of the main intersection. It was what people call corpse messaging. Usually it involves a mutilated body—or a […]

The Stellar Wind confrontation was a rare moment in presidential history, an act of defiance that turned the Commander in Chief in his tracks. “You can only do that once, threaten to resign,” says Frances Fragos Townsend, who was then Bush’s counterterrorism adviser. “The second time you do it, you’re going to be told, ‘Accepted.’” […]

The onetime coach at Southwestern Louisiana was vilified for violating NCAA rules, but the author, who grew up in Cajun country, remembers Beryl Shipley for doing something courageous: helping to integrate college basketball in the Deep South

“You may remember some of my other biggies, such as, ‘Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,’ and ‘Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,’ or (the mother of all advice-quote-pairs): ‘The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to […]

Everyone at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was Jewish—and by “everyone” I mean that while Jews comprise 2 percent of the American population roughly every third person at the conference was Jewish. I met some kids from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a group of terrifyingly bright 20-year-olds, and quickly learned, to my lack […]

Told of Seth Meyers’s admiration for his comic instrument, the anchor replies, “That’s odd, because we’ve never belonged to a health club together, and we’re both in successful long-term relationships.” It’s a classic Williams line: suggestive enough to shock—did Brian Williams just tell a penis joke?—yet veiled enough that it doesn’t seem untoward coming from […]

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we’ve seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet’s poorest […]

Anyhow, this has been my on-and-off job for the past two years. I type. And, I try to type things that will help and comfort people, but mostly I try to type things that will please my editor. Who is awesome. Sometimes I do my job at 6:00 AM Pacific Time. Sometimes I do my […]

And so Martin Amis and his wife, the author Isabel Fonseca, are coming to Cobble Hill. And what’s it like being a writer in Brooklyn? “I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan,” Colson Whitehead once wrote in The New York Times, “but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when […]

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that in number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ […]