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 […]
The New Yorker
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[Fiction] A family prepares for their father’s business trip: Their Da was going away again, that’s all it was. Both boys had said nothing about it, but were awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pajamas and Shawn in yesterday’s clothes, probably no underpants—some objection he had […]
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How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman: Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to […]
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[Fiction, 2012 Pen/O. Henry Winner] A son recalls an exiled life with his father, mother, and a maid: At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book […]
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A story of love and revolution in Cuba. William Morgan was a free-spirited American drawn to Cuba to help Castro fight, only to grow disenchanted with his embrace of communism: One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he […]
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[Fiction] When one person loves the other just a little more: William was tall and thin and shy and awkward in school. His best social tool was that he played the piano, and so was recruited for school musicals, which placed him at rehearsals and cast parties with kids he would otherwise scarcely have known. […]
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How the Supreme Court dismantled campaign-finance reform—and how government missteps in the Citizens United case inadvertently aided in its undoing: Alito wanted to push Stewart down a slippery slope. Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of ‘electronic communications’ shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? […]
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[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends: Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading […]
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Meet the researchers who are developing new methods for countering global warming using geoengineering. Some solutions come with great risks: While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower […]
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How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec: That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding […]