[National Magazine Awards finalist, 2012] A family’s difficult journey after discovering their youngest daughter has a brain tumor: He would remove the tumor, and we would find out what kind it was only after the pathology report. ‘But it looks like a teratoid,’ he said. I didn’t comprehend the word ‘teratoid,’ either—it was beyond my […]
Tag: longreads
What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]
What happens when a grizzly bear kills a human being in Yellowstone National Park? An examination of a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears, while giving leeway to euthanize bears that kill humans in ways that are deemed “unnatural”: It’s a squirrely notion, that a team of government biologists might be able […]
[Not single-page] Brigitte Harris was sexually abused by her father for years, before she decided to stop him from ever doing it to anyone again. She’s now in prison for second degree manslaughter, with a parole hearing this week: The first thing she learned was that it could be done. ‘Everyone always focuses on Lorena […]
Forty years after Title IX, the number of female college athletes has soared, but the number of female college coaches has dropped. What happened? Some blame the dropoff on a shallow pool of female candidates, who often aren’t as eager to apply for jobs, let alone pack up and move, as men. But there are […]
Macau’s rise as the new global gambling capital leads to complications for the Las Vegas casinos that have flocked to China for a piece of the action. Its differences are illustrated in the God of Gamblers case, in which a former barber named Siu Yun Ping won $13 million, setting off a chain of events, […]
[Fiction] An elderly woman encounters her past at her nursing home: A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a […]
The Game of Thrones star’s long path to stardom—and the choices he made to reject stereotypical roles for dwarves: I read about him online the day before the Globes. It really made me sad. I don’t know why.’ He corrected himself: ‘I mean, I know why: it’s terrible.’ In October, Henderson, who is 37 and […]
Two of the world’s best tennis players meet for a match 1912, just weeks after they both survived the Titanic disaster: Now consider a scenario in which two of the survivors were dashing, world-class athletes in the same sport, destined to face off against each other many times. The hype surrounding those matches would be […]
In situations where girls are showing signs of puberty as early as age 6, should parents fight it with drug treatments, or figure out ways for their child to accept what is happening? ‘I would have a long conversation with her family, show them all the data,’ Greenspan continues. Once she has gone through what […]
What it’s like for a teenager to try to emancipate herself: Child Protective Services is meant to protect children from abusive homes and provide safe alternatives with consistent monitoring but often the system fails children. I only knew that the institution was a machine, one capable of destroying lives and spirits in its rigid methodology. […]
Steve Jobs pledged to go “thermonuclear” in Apple’s battle against Google’s Android and device manufacturers like Samsung who he claimed ripped off the iPhone and iPad designs. But bringing a patent fight to court comes with significant risks: Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping […]
What Marx got right—and wrong—about capitalism: The most obvious mistake in his version of the world is to do with class. There is something like a classic Marxian proletariat dispersed through the world. But Marx foresaw that this proletariat would be an increasingly centralised and organised force: indeed, this was one of the reasons it […]
A former Dartmouth College fraternity member speaks out about rampant hazing and alcohol abuse at the Ivy League school. But reforming the frat culture might be too much for just one whistleblower: On January 25th, Andrew Lohse took a major detour from the winning streak he’d been on for most of his life when, breaking […]
A blow-by-blow account of a political negotiation gone wrong. President Obama and Republican House speaker John Boehner came close to a deal last July that would cut federal spending and bring in billions in new revenue. But a series of missteps led to its demise: From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he […]
Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, believes that the United States was probably behind the cyberattack on Iran—and the U.S. is now vulnerable to having it turned back against it: ‘I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,’ he said calmly. This is a fairly astonishing statement […]
A former Major League Baseball No. 1 draft pick battles alcoholism. He’s now in jail, charged with three felonies: In a sport where alcohol plays such a massive part in all social settings—on the same day Bush was arrested, Boston reliever Bobby Jenks, another player with alleged alcohol issues, was charged with a hit-and-run DUI […]
Life on the job with a team of nuclear divers. As nuclear power plants age, they require more upkeep—and much of that work can happen underwater: Last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear […]
Memories of an early pioneer in New York public access television: By all accounts, public access television is dead, or dying, or just living an anonymous existence in the lesser-trolled channels of cable. But despite its decrepit state, I became mildly obsessed with, and then fully addicted to, The Grube Tube—a live talk show on […]
Writer-director Lena Dunham is following her breakthrough, 2010’s Tiny Furniture, with a new HBO series produced with Judd Apatow. Inside the making of the series: “When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should […]
“The most powerful newspaper in Great Britain.” A history of the Daily Mail, founded in 1896 as reading material “by office-boys for office-boys,” as a former prime minister said dismissively. Its daily readership is now four and a half million, and its website recently surpassed the New York Times in traffic, with 52 million unique […]
[1934] A look back at the wine industry in the United States shortly after the end of Prohibition. Wine consumption was growing, but it was unclear whether American companies could compete: Since repeal became imminent the U.S. has been flooded with wine propaganda. In every metropolitan newspaper, experts have conducted daily columns on the art of […]
His best-known novel, Et Tu, Babe, was published 20 years ago, but now the writer has returned (with a new book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) to a world that matches the absurdity of his pre-Internet work: On Charlie Rose [in 1996], Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner sat together in the familiar round […]
Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care: The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality […]
Researchers study a small group of patients who underwent surgery that split their brains: Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information — a word, an object, a […]
Four Western journalists and a former Army Ranger-turned-counterinsurgency expert arrange a paintball game with members of the Shiite militant group, with the hopes of learning more about what motivates them: It took nearly a full year to pull together this game, and all along I’d been convinced that things would fall apart at the last […]
Researchers have worked for years to develop a prosthetic limb controlled by the brain or myoelectric activity. For now, many still prefer the old prosthetics that use centuries-old technology: Watching the arm intently as it goes through these motions, Lehman imagines his missing arm moving in the same way. This focused mental exercise triggers neuromuscular […]
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