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S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era: “Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her […]

An upsurge of abandoned, foreclosed homes in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods has inspired an activist group called the Anti-Eviction Campaign to fix up the properties and provide them to homeless families: “The idea for the Anti-Eviction Campaign actually came from South Africa. Toussaint Losier had traveled there to study the direct-action tactics of an organization called […]

Deinstitutionalization moved thousands of mentally ill people out of hospitals and into the prison system. States are cutting mental-health funding. A look at America’s mental health care crisis: “‘Homelessmentallyilldeinstitutionalized was one noun in the media at the time,’ says SAMHSA’s Roth, who is the source of the oft-cited data point that a third of America’s […]

In the summer of 2012, a homeless man named William Greer Jr. was bludgeoned to death in a park in Austin, Texas. Greer’s case remains unsolved, and his daughter is determined to find answers: “In the weeks that followed her dad’s death, Tangie drove to Austin three times: once to speak to police, once to […]

Inside the lives of homeless families who are staying at a Ramada Inn in the Colorado suburbs: “At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves ‘weeklies.’ To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must […]

Two friends meet up in Bangkok and talk about what became of their childhood friends from the wealthy Seattle neighborhood where they grew up: “Tim keeps naming mutual acquaintances, and they keep having the same dire fates. There’s Pete Stanton, who in seventh grade had a mustache and was the biggest 13-year-old on the planet. […]

A former state legislator considers how the laws he helped pass ultimately harmed his mentally ill son: “If you were to encounter my son, Tim, a tall, gaunt man in ragged clothes, on a San Francisco street, you might step away from him. His clothes, his dark unshaven face and his wild curly hair stamp […]

Men rarely become porn stars, but James Deen has found a large following simply by being “average”: “James Deen, whose real name is Bryan Sevilla, grew up in Pasadena, California. His parents are both, after a fashion, rocket scientists. His father is a mechanical engineer for NASA. His mother does data analysis for the space […]

[Not single-page] A new lab-brewed drug epidemic has law-enforcement officials scrambling to contain it. “The last four decades have seen plenty of whipped-up hysteria about various fad intoxicants of the moment. But the fear generated by bath salts seems well earned. Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts ‘the worst […]