A look at anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann, and on how it is possible for people to experience the voice of a higher being: In the name of research, Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members […]
Tag: longreads
[Not single-page] A visit to one of Philly’s most iconic summer camps: White’s runner arrived at the stage first, and Tyler, a Villanova bunk member who’d been watching older campers do this for years, thrust his face into the dessert topping. A chant rose: ‘Eat that pie! Eat that pie!’ About five minutes into the […]
On what drives the MSNBC star, and how she’s attempted to move her show beyond partisan shouting: Back in 2008, shortly after Phil Griffin called Maddow and told her he was giving her a prime-time television show of her own, she inherited the staff of Verdict With Dan Abrams, a show that embodied the gimmicky […]
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 […]
What does the future hold for Afghanistan after the Americans leave? Some fear that the country’s army won’t be able to stop another civil war from erupting: Many Afghans fear that NATO has lost the will to control the militias, and that the warlords are reëmerging as formidable local forces. Nashir, the Khanabad governor, who […]
A couple learns about a cancer diagnosis: I watch your hand starting to shake as you write down information that will sit on a small square of paper for months, impossible to get rid of. I stand two feet away and watch your lips. I hear you say, Is that all you can tell me…. […]
[Not single-page] Does having more money make a person have less empathy? Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled ‘Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,’ it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies […]
Tracing the modern Olympics back to their origin in rural England, where there was a very different set of competitive events: Ah, but in Much Wenlock, the Olympic spirit thrived, year after year—as it does to this day. Penny Brookes had first scheduled the games on October 22, 1850, in an effort ‘to promote the […]
A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry: I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In […]
Meet the man who’s been standing outside the Vatican embassy for 14 years—a vigil on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church: Time weighs on John Wojnowski. It wears him down. It winds him up. Time, for Wojnowski, is not just the half century since the priest in the mountains of […]
The Girls creator remembers her friendship with Nora Ephron: Her advice was unparalleled. At one of our lunches this past January, I was sheepishly describing a male companion’s lack of support for my professional endeavors. She nodded in a very ‘don’t be stupid’ way, as if I already knew what I had to do: ‘You […]
In investigation into how the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) became accused of intentionally allowing American firearms to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels: Voth grew deeply frustrated. In August 2010, after the ATF in Texas confiscated 80 guns—63 of them purchased in Arizona by the Fast and Furious […]
A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations: On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 […]
Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay: My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several […]
[Fiction] A husband, feeling sick, leaves his father-in-law’s party early: At this point, the husband realizes that he doesn’t want to spend the night reading Rousseau in bed, alone. He thinks about going downstairs to the hotel bar. It’s the kind of thing he never does—but ten minutes later there he is, sitting at the […]
A father and son visit a collector of Nazi paraphernalia in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina: My father glanced over his shoulder at me and emitted a wheeze-burst of laughter—an exhalation intended to express disbelief. He had led me to an underground vault containing the artifacts of the last century’s most brutal regime, and […]
On the dying art of Weir fishing in Maine: When Foster rebuilt the Money Cove weir in 2002, he talked with an old-timer named Bill Blass, who had fished the weir for years, about the cove’s rocky bottom, the contours of that bottom, the tidal patterns, and the arrival of phosphorescent organisms. During the “August […]
How the upcoming Mexican presidential election could impact the drug war in cities like Guadalajara: Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the ‘historic’ meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more […]
A baptist minister in a small Southern town learns acceptance and leans on his faith after his gay son dies of AIDS: In the meantime, word spread from the AIDS outreach organizations across the Chattanooga area that a minister’s son had caught the virus, and the Nevelses were asked to speak at an evening service […]
It’s still remembered as “That Night”—when bowler Bill Fong stunned the crowd at the Plano Super Bowl: Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, […]
The Occupy movement is trying to figure out its future, and keep the momentum going: But Ross, too, soon found himself enchanted by the possibility of the movement. A trained economist, he decided to start an Alternative Banking working group, with the ambitious plan of setting up an Occupy Bank – built on a cooperative, […]
On the history of the American Dream, and how it stands in the U.S. today: The government’s verdict: ‘It is more difficult now than in the past for many people to achieve middle-class status because prices for certain key goods — health care, college and housing — have gone up faster than income.’ Median household […]
A daughter recounts the difficult experience of getting her bipolar father the help he needed to get better: I could feel everyone getting tired. The emergency-screening service kept sending the same patient to the psychiatric hospital, only to see him again the following week. The hospital had to baby-sit for a man who refused to […]
One man’s quest to reshape the online porn industry through the “.xxx” top-level domain: The resistance to Lawley, whatever its merits, has the ring of desperation. ICM arrived at a moment of crisis for commercial porn. After enabling several boom years, the Internet has brought many smut marketers to their knees. Rampant freebies on “tube” […]
Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending. For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently […]
A call for women and men to have a more honest conversation about work-life balance: Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power […]
Does our body tell us when we can’t go any farther, or does our brain? A look at marathon runners and the science behind human endurance. A classic situation in which athletes believe they have hit a true physical limit is ‘bonking’ during a marathon: you stagger to a halt, ostensibly because your body runs […]
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