longreads

What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, […]

Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City? The third major subgenre of the popular Detroit narrative is a backlash against the pornographic excesses of the Lament and is, at best, an attempt to find a new definition of urban vitality. The Utopians are well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities. Locally, they […]

Don’t Look Back: Republican Congressman Darrell Issa Can Explain His Past Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, […]

In a House by the River Jerry had been drinking on February 18, 1995, the night he died just a few hundred feet from our cabin. He was alone there that weekend; my mom and I were skiing in Tahoe. I was 13, old enough to feel the calamity of his death but too young […]

Jeff Smith Was a Rising Political star. Then the FBI Started Asking Questions About His Past That evening, Smith gave a speech at a fund-raiser in a downtown loft. He found it difficult to focus. “As I was talking, I had an ominous sense of foreboding about what was to come,” he says. “I looked […]

George Lois on Advertising and the Death of the Magazine Cover “[Magazine covers] are very carefully researched. They test them: ‘Do you like this line better than this one?’ If you have to depend on blurbs to have people buy your magazine then you’ve got a piece of shit! You don’t have a brand! You […]

A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. Jabbar Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through […]

The History of the Glock in America—and What Happened To Our Conversation About Gun Laws Glock led the charge back into the large-capacity clip business. Other gun and accessory makers also pushed ever-larger magazines. Today, Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson, where Loughner bought his Glock, advertises a 50-round “Tactical Solutions Drum Magazine” for .22 caliber Ruger […]