“The reality is, and will always be, we were in a moment. Nobody—I don’t think—really understood the history that was being made.” The members of New Edition give an oral history of the making of Heart Break, their quadruple platinum album, originally released in 1988.
Editor’s Pick
Posted inEditor's Pick
Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
A German magazine reports that a shadowy analytics company with a powerful new tool is swaying elections around the world in favor of hard-right nationalist candidates. The tool, which, according to one study, shows that marketers “can attract up to 63% more clicks and up to 1400% more conversions” on Facebook, works by micro-targeting individuals […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
In Tbilisi
An excerpt from “A Trip to Tbilisi,” a 2015 work of graphic reportage from journalist, activist, and artist Victoria Lomasko’s visit to the Georgian capital. Her work, drawn live on the scene, focuses on figures on the fringes: migrants, the LGBT community, juvenile prison inmates, sex workers.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Murderous Manila: On the Night Shift
“No one will be safe until many, many more have died.” In a dispatch from Manila, James Fenton describes the current war on drugs in the Philippines and two types of killings: “buy-bust” operations and EJKs, or extrajudicial killings.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Unbearable Niceness of Being
On niceness in publishing, and why we should ask men to do better.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Russia: Life After Trust
Michael Idov, who’d returned to his native Russia for work a few years ago, recalls the culture of cynicism and sense of hopeless defeat under a deceitful, immovable “hybrid regime…an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy.” He suggests Americans take note, as we may be headed in that direction ourselves.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Michele Kirsch: My Life As a Cleaner in London
Michele Kirsch on working as a cleaner in London, England, and the fascinating, unspoken social rules that keep a cleaner-cleanee relationship “shipshape and Bristol-fashion.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Untold Story of the Bastille Day Attacker
The strange story of Mohamed Salmène Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who killed 86 people — ages 2 to 92 — with a 21 ton truck on Bastille Day, 2016, framing seemingly unwitting accomplices “in a crime without discernible meaning.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Fiction Confidential
Before he became the patron saint of every tattooed-chef-in-a-gentrifying-neighborhood, Anthony Bourdain wrote novels. What can they tell us about the man behind the bad-boy persona?