An essay from Bissell’s book Magic Hours: A film crew and actor Jeff Daniels arrive in the author’s Michigan hometown to shoot a movie: As the sun sets behind the thick pine stand that perimeters the football field, the lack of extras begins to become a problem. To appreciate how crucial extras are to tonight’s […]
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How did pedestrians become an endangered species in the United States—and why is the word “pedestrian” wrong anyway? First in a four-part series: A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a ‘Pedestrian Safety’ panel was being held. The speaker […]
What it was like for a teenager to go through “ex-gay” therapy—and how the movements associated with such practices have fallen apart: After our initial meeting, I spoke with Nicolosi weekly by phone for more than three years, from the time I was 14 until I graduated high school. Like a rabbi instructing his student […]
[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom: The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter. ‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’ ‘Is […]
Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin: Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry […]
How the introduction of stats into MMA (mixed martial arts) will change how the matches are fought: For all that enthusiasm, however, the sport has had a weak spot: It can be surprisingly difficult to say with any specificity what makes a mixed martial artist great, or what makes one fighter better than another. In […]
More actors, filmmakers and execs are using human growth hormone (H.G.H.) in an attempt to reverse the aging process. But is it really doing what its Beverly Hills evangelists are claiming? He has been giving himself H.G.H. injections for more than 20 years. And he does look terrific, with smooth skin and a lean body. […]
Life as a cop in 2012, from the officers’ perspective. How Commissioner Ray Kelly and the legendary CompStat system have changed New York’s police department, both for better (dropping crime rates) and worse (increasing pressure on officers to make the numbers): The disaffection from the public and anger at the department aren’t universal, but they […]
[National Magazine Awards finalist, Public Interest] An investigation of rampant sexual violence that goes unpunished at a Sioux reservation: Kim reported the rape, and Mike was arrested and jailed. As soon as she returned to the reservation, his family began threatening her, calling her a liar and a bitch. Whenever they saw her on the […]
[Not single-page] IBM and Microsoft teamed up on what was supposed to be the operating system that changed everything. It didn’t turn out that way: Meanwhile, Microsoft was two-timing the operating system it had co-created. In May 1990, it released Windows 3.0, the first version that was sort of decent. In terms of technical underpinnings, […]
On the balance between admiration and friendship. A writer strikes up an email relationship with the author he most admires, Leonard Michaels: In his work Lenny exhibited incisiveness, self-awareness, and control, and yet in life he sometimes appeared to me to be innocently childlike. He was often very emotionally candid. He talked freely and unguardedly […]
Inside the rock star’s Nashville home and the headquarters for his growing company, Third Man Records: White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing […]
The key to solving hunger in Africa starts with improving the soil. An overview of agricultural subsidies and the debate over whether the best approach is through inorganic fertilizers or greener, cheaper (but more difficult) solutions like no-till farming: Fertilizer use in Africa is at the mercy of precarious politics. Although Rwanda’s fertilizer programme is […]
The killing of three sisters shocks a country where the past decade has seen a rise in violence toward women: Since the turn of the millennium, over 5,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala. To give a better idea of what this figure means, consider that if Guatemala, with its population of 14 million, were […]
[National Magazine Awards finalist, 2012] A family’s difficult journey after discovering their youngest daughter has a brain tumor: He would remove the tumor, and we would find out what kind it was only after the pathology report. ‘But it looks like a teratoid,’ he said. I didn’t comprehend the word ‘teratoid,’ either—it was beyond my […]
What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]
What happens when a grizzly bear kills a human being in Yellowstone National Park? An examination of a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears, while giving leeway to euthanize bears that kill humans in ways that are deemed “unnatural”: It’s a squirrely notion, that a team of government biologists might be able […]
[Not single-page] Brigitte Harris was sexually abused by her father for years, before she decided to stop him from ever doing it to anyone again. She’s now in prison for second degree manslaughter, with a parole hearing this week: The first thing she learned was that it could be done. ‘Everyone always focuses on Lorena […]
Forty years after Title IX, the number of female college athletes has soared, but the number of female college coaches has dropped. What happened? Some blame the dropoff on a shallow pool of female candidates, who often aren’t as eager to apply for jobs, let alone pack up and move, as men. But there are […]
Macau’s rise as the new global gambling capital leads to complications for the Las Vegas casinos that have flocked to China for a piece of the action. Its differences are illustrated in the God of Gamblers case, in which a former barber named Siu Yun Ping won $13 million, setting off a chain of events, […]
[Fiction] An elderly woman encounters her past at her nursing home: A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a […]
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