Editor’s Pick

Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh’s answer was […]

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji. Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For […]

I say “he” because my subject is the specific kind of boy who takes up running, and he is very different from the girl who is his counterpart. This boy, whom I know well, is just not good at any other sport. He may have tried baseball, but could not throw; he may have tried […]

[Featuring Writing] Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going […]

The body was what the decade was about, beginning with where a body was. The Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1970. Also in 1970, the American ballerina Suzanne Farrell defected from choreographer George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet (NYCB) and joined Maurice Béjart and […]

“I don’t like the title ‘The Father of MP3,’” says Karlheinz Brandenburg. But he kinda is. “Certainly I was involved all the time from basic research [to] getting it into the market.” Brandenburg was part of the group that gave the MP3 its name. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) lent its name to the […]

The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals — and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played — deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since […]

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough […]

The luxury brand remains under tight control by the Hermès heirs, who have scattered across three continents to pursue careers as varied as deejaying, motorcycle sales, and investment banking. And they want nothing to do with their new minority shareholder. Bernard Arnault is the head of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and the fourth-richest man […]

Even agent Edward Montooth, who ran the FBI’s hunt for the anthrax killer, says that—while he’s still convinced Ivins was the mailer—he’s unsure of many things, from Bruce Ivins’ motivation to when he brewed up the lethal spores. “We still have a difficult time nailing down the time frame,” he says. “We don’t know when […]