longreads

Why Isn’t Mike Vanderjagt Still Kicking In The NFL? Some might think the answer comes down to two phrases: “idiot kicker” and “liquored up.” These four words were famously uttered in one sentence at the Pro Bowl in 2003 by Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. You remember: Vanderjagt had gone on Canadian TV and said he […]

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code Mohan Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, […]

Anonymous Was a Woman I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf wrote those words about the entire realm of literary creation, not about that special subset of it called “quotations”—the minting of concise snippets so […]

Gary Francione, Animal Advocate “We all condemn Michael Vick for sitting around a pit and watching dogs fight because he derives pleasure from doing so. The rest of us sit around the barbecue pit and roast the bodies of animals who have been tortured as badly as—if not worse than—Vick’s fighting dogs, because we enjoy […]

The Great Afghan Bank Heist Poring over stacks of documents, investigators at the American Embassy in Kabul have pinpointed dozens of instances in which Kabul Bank executives may have bribed Afghan officials, including a successful bid to hold the contract to process the salaries that the government pays its employees each month—approximately seventy-five million dollars. […]