The writer confronts her inability to have children and explores how humans’ behavior with reproduction compares with other animals: Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating […]
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How psychedelic drugs are helping terminally ill patients face death: Norbert Litzinger, [Pam] Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still […]
[Fiction] A born-again adolescent takes a joyride with his wandering uncle: My parents and I had been waiting for Uncle Skillet to show up for five hours, wasting an entire Saturday as far as I was concerned, and not just any old Saturday but a glorious early summer one of God’s pure sunshine and chirping […]
Survivors and crew members recount the Costa Concordia crash, in which 32 people lost their lives: The Concordia’s loss is also a landmark moment in naval history. It is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. The 4,000 people who fled its slippery decks—nearly twice as many as were aboard the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912—represent the […]
A New Yorker with limited French skills gets dropped into an advertising agency in Paris: In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, […]
On the unmet medical needs of transgender people: The problem is that in the United States, most physicians don’t exactly know what treatment for the transgender patient entails. For an untrained professional, it’s a challenge to provide care to a patient with a penis who wants a vagina, or to a patient who has been […]
A review of Tom Bissell’s new book of essays, Magic Hours: The best thing about Tom Bissell: He is fun. I think of him as “a wild and crazy guy.” I’m by turns entertained and completely aghast at his antics. He is totally obsessive. He’s watched that appalling movie The Room a bajillion times. I […]
[Fiction] A grandmother’s ruminations on a Southern road trip: The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge […]
The complicated business of helping Cuban baseball talent find their way to the U.S., and eventually the Major League: At some point — either before leaving Cuba or postdefection — every player needs a baseball agent. The seedier practitioners of this trade are often called buscónes, or searchers. Sometimes they bully clients into paying. ‘I’ve […]
On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles: The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment […]
[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath: Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her. You’d fuck […]
The complete origins story of the Huffington Post. How Arianna Huffington, Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti first connected, and how they turned the company into a media empire, and now Pulitzer winner: In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the […]
[Not single-page] The departing congressman reflects on what’s wrong with Washington, and how his coming out in the 1980s was first received by his Democrat and Republican colleagues: Robert Bauman had written a book in which he outed me. He incorrectly referred to somebody as my boyfriend—he wasn’t; he was a close personal friend—but he […]
The untold story of George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Hagan revisits the mystery that led to the downfall of CBS’s Dan Rather—with new details on what may have really happened when Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972: The CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and […]
[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement: Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous […]
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy? I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few […]
[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist: Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second […]
[National Magazine Awards finalist] [Fiction] A honeymoon set in Eastern Europe in the 1970s: Since the beginning of their honeymoon, whenever something went wrong she had been eager to remind him. Is this enough of an adventure for you? Aren’t adventures fun? But here they were, in Bucharest, sitting on the edge of a fountain […]
As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ: Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with […]
A tour of one of the most dangerous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border—where drug smuggling and human trafficking mean Arizona ranch owners finding bodies in their backyards: In late 2010, after the ninth corpse or body part had been discovered on his ranch in a span of 12 months, David Lowell sat down and drafted […]
How did the 1970s and Los Angeles end up creating such idiosyncratic singer-songwriters as Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks? The first thing you should know about Harry Nilsson is that he won a Grammy for covering a schmaltzy Badfinger ballad called ‘Without You’ in 1971. The second thing you should know is […]
The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government: What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the […]
First in a series on John Bolenbaugh, an oil cleanup worker who said he was fired for refusing to cover up oil from a spill that put millions of gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Complicating matters is his personality and his own criminal record: Armed with a digital camera and a […]
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