Excerpt from Maraniss’s new biography of the president. A look at Obama’s early twenties in New York, from the perspective of his girlfriend at the time: Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 […]
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A writer digs into his grandfather’s past and discovers stories about life as a professional basketball player in the 1940s for the Chicago Stags, part of the BAA (Basketball Association of America), which later merged with another league to become the NBA: Detroit’s coach gave Schadler the score: ‘I have a wife and kids, and […]
The story of a mysterious sports writer, her business partners, and an alleged plot to co-opt an NBA fan’s Facebook page: Phillips kept up her correspondence with Ben, the 19-year-old college student and creator of the NBA Memes Facebook page. She said he could make up to as much as $1,000 per post as a […]
The quest for the perfect dairy cow—starting with Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie, a bull who has 50,000 markers on his genome that make him the best sire at the moment: While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is […]
An oral history of Friends: JIM BURROWS (director): Based on the [live] audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show would be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., ‘Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.’ I took […]
Forty years after hijacking a plane and then disappearing, George Wright is found: On the afternoon of August 19, 1970, a couple of men approached Wright. Their names were Jimmy and Jumbo. Wright was working in the prison laundry at the time. The men said they’d had enough of prison and wanted to do something […]
The complicated relationship between founders of a startup. Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein lead Turntable.fm, but with very different viewpoints on how to succeed: Then traffic started falling. By autumn, it dwindled to less than half its peak, and the very same tech watchers started wondering whether it was all over. Goldstein says he can […]
[Fiction] An urban teen moves to Virginia and tries to stay out of trouble: When Marcus’s mother and her boyfriend and just about everybody they knew were put in jail for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Marcus went to live with his aunt for a while. Marcus was sixteen, a hurdler and sprinter on […]
How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec: That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding […]
A former research assistant for Bob Woodward is hired to help Ben Bradlee work on another book, and discovers that the former Washington Post managing editor still has unresolved questions from the Watergate era: Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage […]
“If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then [Eric] Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.” Meet the former Boston Herald reporter-turned-consigliere to the presidential candidate: It was January of 2008, the last time Romney ran for president, and Fehrnstrom was getting in the face of an Associated Press reporter in a Staples store in South Carolina. The reporter, […]
On former News of the World editor Colin Myler, who was blamed by Rupert Murdoch for the phone-hacking scandal. He’s now taking on Rupert as editor of the New York Daily News, the tabloid rival of the Murdoch-owned New York Post: The fun is going to be in competing against a man who first saved […]
[Fiction] A teenage boy falls into criminal life: It was the first summer Jack and Mom didn’t care when I came home. Finding things missing around the house, Jack had said something about his wallet springing a leak, and it better fix itself fast. I was a much better liar than Betsy, and had perfected […]
Profile of Srdja Popovic, who was a member of Otpor (Resistance), the nonviolent group that helped topple Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000. He’s since formed an NGO called Canvas, which advises rebels in 40 countries on how to use the tools of nonviolent struggle: The trainers, all former participants in protests, deliver the curriculum, […]
A new chemical endangerment law in Alabama, originally designed to protect children from meth labs, is now being used to prosecute mothers who used drugs during their pregnancy: Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has […]
Chris Chaney was a 33-year-old loner in Florida who decided to shake up his boredom by breaking into celebrities’ email accounts. Soon he discovered nude photos of Scarlett Johansson and other stars, and then the FBI came calling: While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos […]
Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next: John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed […]
A man attempts to track down his middle school teacher and offer a long-overdue apology: Only by chance was I curious enough about the subject line — ‘Customer Feedback’ — to open the email from a man named Larry Israelson. You published an item involving retired teacher James Atteberry and the CASA program. Mr. Atteberry […]
[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5: My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when […]
Coming Monday, May 14th: Bloomberg Businessweek and Longreads present “Behind the Tech Longreads”: A night of storytelling featuring Felix Gillette, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Brad Stone, Ashlee Vance and editor Josh Tyrangiel. Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Manhattan, 7 p.m., Free admission RSVP on our Facebook Page
How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered: But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables […]
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