Search Results for: The Nation

Trailers Are for Travelers

Longreads Pick

After weeks of surveillance, the Home Depot security officers knew they were onto something big, but they didn’t quite know how big. They didn’t know that the events of that day would unleash a bizarre yearlong investigation that will culminate in Oakland next week with the beginning of the sentencing process for Davenport, Hay, and Broderick on federal charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They didn’t know that the trio’s trail would lead through at least 24 states, and that the investigation’s nationwide scope would draw in the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office. They didn’t know that the dent the three managed to make in Home Depot’s pocketbook, originally estimated at $400,000, would soar toward an estimated $1 million.

Published: Sep 1, 2003
Length: 26 minutes (6,537 words)

The Doree Chronicles: Stuff I Read This Week That Was Good

The Doree Chronicles: Stuff I Read This Week That Was Good

A Talent for Sloth

A Talent for Sloth

A Talent for Sloth

Longreads Pick

My lookout tower is situated five miles from the nearest road, on a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Gila National Forest. I live here for several months each year, without electricity or running water. Although tens of thousands of acres are touched by fire here every year, I can go weeks without seeing a twist of smoke. During these lulls I simply watch and wait, my eyes becoming ever more intimate with an ecological transition zone encompassing dry grasslands, pinon-juniper foothills, ponderosa parkland, and spruce-fir high country.

Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,065 words)

Rad Storm Rising (1990)

Rad Storm Rising (1990)

Rad Storm Rising

Longreads Pick

A hundred and fifty years ago the Russian philosopher Petr Chaadayev wrote that “we are one of those nations that somehow are not part of mankind but exist only for the sake of teaching the world some kind of terrible lesson.” In the area of nuclear affairs the steady emission of environmental horror stories from the USSR confirms that the Soviet Union is in the process of teaching the world another in its series of terrible lessons.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 1990
Length: 17 minutes (4,460 words)

The Billionaire Who Is Planning His 125th Birthday

Longreads Pick

There are health nuts, and then there is David Murdock: health paragon, patron and proselytizer, with a biography as colorful as that mural, a determination to write a few more chapters of it still and a paradox of sorts at the center of it all. What set him on this quest was a loss that no amplitude of wellness can restore, and even if he teased out his days into eternity, he would be hard pressed to fill them with the contentment they once had.

Published: Mar 6, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,925 words)

A Declaration of Cyber-War

A Declaration of Cyber-War

On Military Life and Sacrifice

On Military Life and Sacrifice

If She Did It

If She Did It