On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles: The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment […]
Tag: longreads
[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath: Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her. You’d fuck […]
The complete origins story of the Huffington Post. How Arianna Huffington, Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti first connected, and how they turned the company into a media empire, and now Pulitzer winner: In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the […]
[Not single-page] The departing congressman reflects on what’s wrong with Washington, and how his coming out in the 1980s was first received by his Democrat and Republican colleagues: Robert Bauman had written a book in which he outed me. He incorrectly referred to somebody as my boyfriend—he wasn’t; he was a close personal friend—but he […]
The untold story of George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Hagan revisits the mystery that led to the downfall of CBS’s Dan Rather—with new details on what may have really happened when Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972: The CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and […]
[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement: Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous […]
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy? I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few […]
[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist: Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second […]
[National Magazine Awards finalist] [Fiction] A honeymoon set in Eastern Europe in the 1970s: Since the beginning of their honeymoon, whenever something went wrong she had been eager to remind him. Is this enough of an adventure for you? Aren’t adventures fun? But here they were, in Bucharest, sitting on the edge of a fountain […]
As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ: Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with […]
A tour of one of the most dangerous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border—where drug smuggling and human trafficking mean Arizona ranch owners finding bodies in their backyards: In late 2010, after the ninth corpse or body part had been discovered on his ranch in a span of 12 months, David Lowell sat down and drafted […]
How did the 1970s and Los Angeles end up creating such idiosyncratic singer-songwriters as Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks? The first thing you should know about Harry Nilsson is that he won a Grammy for covering a schmaltzy Badfinger ballad called ‘Without You’ in 1971. The second thing you should know is […]
The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government: What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the […]
First in a series on John Bolenbaugh, an oil cleanup worker who said he was fired for refusing to cover up oil from a spill that put millions of gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Complicating matters is his personality and his own criminal record: Armed with a digital camera and a […]
An essay from Bissell’s book Magic Hours: A film crew and actor Jeff Daniels arrive in the author’s Michigan hometown to shoot a movie: As the sun sets behind the thick pine stand that perimeters the football field, the lack of extras begins to become a problem. To appreciate how crucial extras are to tonight’s […]
How did pedestrians become an endangered species in the United States—and why is the word “pedestrian” wrong anyway? First in a four-part series: A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a ‘Pedestrian Safety’ panel was being held. The speaker […]
What it was like for a teenager to go through “ex-gay” therapy—and how the movements associated with such practices have fallen apart: After our initial meeting, I spoke with Nicolosi weekly by phone for more than three years, from the time I was 14 until I graduated high school. Like a rabbi instructing his student […]
[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom: The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter. ‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’ ‘Is […]
Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin: Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry […]
How the introduction of stats into MMA (mixed martial arts) will change how the matches are fought: For all that enthusiasm, however, the sport has had a weak spot: It can be surprisingly difficult to say with any specificity what makes a mixed martial artist great, or what makes one fighter better than another. In […]
More actors, filmmakers and execs are using human growth hormone (H.G.H.) in an attempt to reverse the aging process. But is it really doing what its Beverly Hills evangelists are claiming? He has been giving himself H.G.H. injections for more than 20 years. And he does look terrific, with smooth skin and a lean body. […]
Life as a cop in 2012, from the officers’ perspective. How Commissioner Ray Kelly and the legendary CompStat system have changed New York’s police department, both for better (dropping crime rates) and worse (increasing pressure on officers to make the numbers): The disaffection from the public and anger at the department aren’t universal, but they […]
[National Magazine Awards finalist, Public Interest] An investigation of rampant sexual violence that goes unpunished at a Sioux reservation: Kim reported the rape, and Mike was arrested and jailed. As soon as she returned to the reservation, his family began threatening her, calling her a liar and a bitch. Whenever they saw her on the […]
[Not single-page] IBM and Microsoft teamed up on what was supposed to be the operating system that changed everything. It didn’t turn out that way: Meanwhile, Microsoft was two-timing the operating system it had co-created. In May 1990, it released Windows 3.0, the first version that was sort of decent. In terms of technical underpinnings, […]
On the balance between admiration and friendship. A writer strikes up an email relationship with the author he most admires, Leonard Michaels: In his work Lenny exhibited incisiveness, self-awareness, and control, and yet in life he sometimes appeared to me to be innocently childlike. He was often very emotionally candid. He talked freely and unguardedly […]
Inside the rock star’s Nashville home and the headquarters for his growing company, Third Man Records: White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing […]
The key to solving hunger in Africa starts with improving the soil. An overview of agricultural subsidies and the debate over whether the best approach is through inorganic fertilizers or greener, cheaper (but more difficult) solutions like no-till farming: Fertilizer use in Africa is at the mercy of precarious politics. Although Rwanda’s fertilizer programme is […]
The killing of three sisters shocks a country where the past decade has seen a rise in violence toward women: Since the turn of the millennium, over 5,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala. To give a better idea of what this figure means, consider that if Guatemala, with its population of 14 million, were […]
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