The Secrets Behind Your Flowers: The Path from Colombia to the U.S. In 1967 David Cheever, a graduate student in horticulture at Colorado State University, wrote a term paper titled “Bogotá, Colombia as a Cut-Flower Exporter for World Markets.” The paper suggested that the savanna near Colombia’s capital was an ideal place to grow flowers […]
Tag: longreads
The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots “It isn’t a question of whether or not he should have done the story. It’s a story,” says Frank Deford, who’s been writing for Sports Illustrated since 1962. “But aren’t there better stories to do? Do we really want to know about Brett Favre trying to get laid? Wouldn’t […]
The White House Looks for Work At the center was Summers, a larger-than-life figure who by many accounts was ill suited to run a bureaucratic process. To some of his colleagues, Summers was an eye-rolling intellectual bully. “He’s much better at telling you why you’re stupid than creating a system that can produce usable policy […]
The Case Against Lance Armstrong Mike Anderson says he felt a dull sadness as he stared at the little white cardboard box in Armstrong’s bathroom cabinet. His eyes focused on the word ANDRO written on the label. Anderson tried to rationalize it. Maybe it was leftover cancer medication, but this was 2004, long after Armstrong’s […]
The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On Health Care Reform It revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority. It’s an arcane legal point, but, suddenly, a consequential one, and not just because of its […]
Opium Wars: Can Afghan Farmers Really Stop Growing Poppies? “We have two forms of money here: poppy, and American dollars,” says a beardless 33-year-old Helmand farmer named Rehmatou as he leaves the Marine base with his fertilizer. “This is our economy. The Taliban aren’t pressuring me—that’s just a story you see on TV. I grow […]
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America? Does any of us win all the time? Of course not, or else we wouldn’t be average. But Roger Ailes does. And so, Mr. Ailes, Esquire has a question, on behalf of other average Americans: What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his […]
Longreads Topic Du Jour: The Playboy Interview This morning we posted a classic—Alex Haley’s 1965 Playboy Interview with Martin Luther King Jr. —which served as another reminder of how many great (and, yes, long) interviews Hef’s magazine has published over the years. Here are a few more from the Longreads archive (Jimmy Carter, John & Yoko, Steve […]
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, […]
pegb: Pirate’s Booty by Dave Gardetta Technosexual: One Man’s Tale of Robot Love by Addy Dugdale Et Tu, Brooklyn? by Allison Silverman The Golden Suicides by Nancy Jo Sales Addiction Files: Recovering From Drug Addiction, Without Abstinence by Maia Szalavitz Addiction Files: How Do We Define Recovery? by Maia Szalavitz Secret of AA: After 75 Years, […]
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, […]
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 […]
The Man Who Wouldn’t Die: Meet Olympian and Biggest Loser Contestant Rulon Gardner Ru left a message on Grant’s machine. “Hey, brotha,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hey, I just wanted you to know that we crashed into Lake Powell yesterday, and we swam two miles and huddled up like puppies through the night, and we survived. […]
Europe’s Odd Couple zeketurner: That is when she had to face Sarkozy. “She’s a scientist, almost like a German cliché, planning everything, going step by step, unemotional, not a show horse,” Stefan Kornelius, a senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, told me. “But Sarkozy’s the kind of macho man that she doesn’t like at all. […]
Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland. *** Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 903 words / 3.5 minutes No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of […]
Gram Junkies: In Transportation Design the Key Issue Is Not Speed, but Weight Transport economist Chris Bradshaw wants planners and designers to respect what he calls “the scalar hierarchy.” This is when trips taken most frequently are short enough to be made by walking (even if pulling a small cart), while the next more frequent […]
Transcript: President Obama’s Address in Tucson I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.
The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our Military Machines Too Much Power? Dahm’s vision, however, suggests another “Terminator scenario,” one more plausible and not without menace. Over the course of dozens of interviews with military officials, robot designers and technology ethicists, I came to understand that we are at work on not one but two […]
Night-Shifting For the Hip Fleet Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-50-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teen-agers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not too bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. But a year later the cab stories at Dover sound just […]
The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved with Euros The advantages of a single European currency were obvious. No more need to change money when you arrived in another country; no more uncertainty on the part of importers about what a contract would actually end up costing or on the part of exporters about what […]
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7: The Death of Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell Search for Bradley Nowell videos on YouTube and you’ll find a smattering of interview clips recorded a year or so before he died. Here he is backstage on the Warped Tour looking like one of the many shirtless, deeply tanned, […]
Separation Anxiety: How Always-On Digital Culture Affects Our Behavior The e-personality is more impulse-driven and more narcissistic; it gives itself permission to explore or seek out more morbid subjects; it regresses to earlier developmental stages that are more about action without heed to consequences; and it has a more grandiose view of itself. By Joan […]
‘I Will Never Know Why’: Susan Klebold on Her Son’s Participation in the Columbine Killings Those of us who cared for Dylan felt responsible for his death. We thought, “If I had been a better (mother, father, brother, friend, aunt, uncle, cousin), I would have known this was coming.” We perceived his actions to be […]
Upon This Rock Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—”If you like Drakkar Noir, you’ll love Sexy Musk”? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian off-brand, and that’s proper, because culturally speaking, it’s supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or […]
No Objections: What History Tells Us About Gay Marriage Although gender parity between spouses would have been unthinkable at the founding of the United States, marriage laws have moved over time in this direction. In Anglo-American common law, marriage was based on the legal fiction that the married couple was a single entity, with the […]
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