[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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing state attorneys general in the Supreme Court fight against Obama’s health care law—and it’s just one of seven cases he’ll be arguing before the court: There are two ways to assess a Supreme Court argument. One is to view it as an act […]
How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers: Until recently, the universal self-actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who […]
Liberals’ history with regard to gay rights is not as progressive as some would like you to remember: It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American […]
How the 2012 GOP primary became such a mess—and what it means for the future of the party: That Mitt Romney finds himself so imperiled by Rick Santorum—Rick Santorum!—is just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping developments in what has been the most volatile, unpredictable, and just plain wackadoodle Republican-nomination contest ever. Part of […]
[Not single-page] Tory Burch’s ex-husband Christopher Burch has a new fashion line called C. Wonder. But some in her circle wonder if it draws a little too much inspiration from her own brand: To Chris Burch, C. Wonder is the realization of a long-held dream to provide low-to-mid-price retail in a luxury setting. To Tory […]
[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street’s business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching: For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an […]
Capital New York covers last night’s “Behind the Longreads” event with New York magazine, and tells writer Dan P. Lee’s story about how he reported his “Travis the Menace” story: Lee, in a striped grey-and-black hoodie and a mop of dirty blonde hair that matched his five o’clock shadow, was participating in a panel discussion […]
[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country: “A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ […]
Reminder: This is next Wednesday! “Behind the Longreads” at Housing Works in NYC with New York magazine’s Dan P. Lee, Jessica Pressler, Wesley Yang and Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss. It’s a free event, and you can now RSVP on the Longreads Facebook page. Because this night is going to be about the stories themselves, we’ve prepared […]
[Not single-page] Chen, a 19-year-old who grew up in New York’s Chinatown, joins the Army. Nine months later, he’s found dead in Afghanistan from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, after facing constant abuse from his superiors: The Army recently announced that it was charging eight soldiers—an officer and seven enlisted men—in connection with Danny Chen’s death. […]
[Not single-page] Levi Aron remained single for the bulk of his twenties, a sign that he was considered by both his family and the neighborhood shadken to be of lesser stock. For companionship, he turned to a group of like-minded Jews, most of them also single men. They called themselves rebels, one friend remembers. They […]
It is not that Kagan is silent at oral argument. She is more talkative than her bow-tied predecessor, Justice John Paul Stevens, who tended to sit quietly through most of each session before gently asking, “May I ask a question?” Kagan asked ten questions on her very first day out last fall. But she actually […]
[Not single-page.] Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong […]
(Not single-page) For some, reclaiming her old seat has become the sine qua non of her recovery, part of its definition. In the book she offers a simple, heartfelt declaration: “I will get stronger. I will return.” But there are other options if it takes longer than expected. One of the daydreams floating through the […]
Still, a man who at 105—he’ll be 106 on December 19—has never had a life-threatening disease, who takes no cholesterol or blood-pressure medications and can give himself a clean shave each morning (not to mention a “serious sponge bath with vigorous rubbing all around”), invites certain questions. Is there something about his habits that predisposed […]
What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-American optimism, but at each aftershock […]
Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was […]
And so six o’clock dawned on the South Pacific. And there was nothing. Reached on his doorstep the following morning, Camping was, he said, “flabbergasted.” He was visibly shaken. “It has been a really tough weekend,” he acknowledged. He said he was “looking for answers.” And so in the hours that followed he pulled the […]
“At Twitter, where anxiety and optimism are never far from one another, the leadership is surprisingly frank about these problems. To start with, the audience is alarmingly fickle. Nielsen estimated that user-retention rates were around 40 percent. Twitter was easy to use at an entry level, but after a while it was hard for some […]
“One recalled that as a girl, she would enact a nocturnal parental ritual in reverse: She, the child, would creep out from her bed to listen at her mother’s door for the precious sound of breathing. ‘She was just terrified,’ Morris says, ‘that her mother would die.’” “Parents of a Certain Age.” — Lisa Miller, […]
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