longreads

A Declaration of Cyber-War In the end, the most important thing now publicly known about Stuxnet is that Stuxnet is now publicly known. That knowledge is, on the simplest level, a warning: America’s own critical infrastructure is a sitting target for attacks like this. That aside, if Stuxnet really did attack Iran’s nuclear program, it […]

Hate Man From the time he was young boy, Mark Hawthorne understood the power of words. His father was a reporter for the Associated Press and his mother was a school teacher. So when Hawthorne landed his dream job and became a reporter for The New York Times, everything seemed to fall into place. Except […]

On Military Life and Sacrifice Before he addressed the crowd that had assembled in the St. Louis Hyatt Regency ballroom last November, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly had one request. “Please don’t mention my son,” he asked the Marine Corps officer introducing him. Four days earlier, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly , 29, had stepped […]

James L. Brooks on Journalism, the Oscars, and ‘Broadcast News’ We filmed it almost entirely in sequence. We even broke up the newsroom scenes just so we could shoot the picture in sequence. And that means we kept informing ourselves. That means we woke up and these things happened with people in the sequence they’re […]

The Madoff Tapes And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’ ” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She […]

Story’s End: Grief and Writing a Mother’s Death It was my mother who had long ago planted in me the habit of writing things down in order to understand them. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy-covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, puzzled. “What […]

Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat “Here’s a peek into my insanity,” Charlie Sheen tells me one afternoon in February. “People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from Apocalypse Now or Jaws.” It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the […]