Read the best long reads from around the internet, including outstanding long-form articles leading publishers like The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, LA Times, Washington Post and many more.
The US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Japanese finally succumbed to the threat of further nuclear bombardment and surrendered. The support for this narrative runs deep. But there are three major problems with it, and, taken together, they significantly undermine the traditional interpretation of the Japanese surrender.
To thousands of young millennials from humble backgrounds, Jordan Belfort’s Wolf of Wall Street story became a blueprint for how to escape an unremarkable life on low pay. Their social media feeds display super-rich lifestyles, but what are these self-styled traders really selling?
Richard Phillips survived the longest wrongful prison sentence in American history by writing poetry and painting with watercolors. But on a cold day in the prison yard, he carried a knife and thought about revenge.
In a journal with unlined 8-by-10 paper, Zuckerberg sketched his mission and product design and explored how a tiny company might become a vital utility for the world. In detail, he described features called Open Registration and Feed, two products that would supercharge his company.
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
After police failed to solve his son’s murder, Francisco Holgado infiltrated the local criminal underworld in pursuit of those responsible. He became a national hero – but at what cost?
Oxygen and iron are essential for the production of energy, but may also conspire to destroy the delicate order of our cells. Elevated iron is at the center of a web of disease stretching from cancer to diabetes.
On April 16, 2007, the fuzzy, grey star had just set, and the bustling streets cast further into darkness, when police detectives arrived at the Agricultural Bank of China. When detectives entered the vault, they were stumped. The suspects had left behind only one piece of physical evidence: a bag full of lottery tickets.
Thomas Piketty’s 753-page book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker “Capital and Ideology”, may prove still more influential.
Marriage is practiced in every society yet is in steep decline globally. Is marriage collapsing because empowered women have less need for pair-bonds? Many writers trace the decline of marriage to the growing ease of single parenthood.
Economic mobility to rival Denmark’s, but without big government. Can the rest of the U.S. emulate Utah’s success? We could offer more, and better, help to people who need it. Why not look for more promising scripts than the ones played out across the U.S. today?
Walmart has an incentive to become the place people think about when they think of their financial future. Inside Walmart’s curious, possibly ingenious effort to get customers to build up their savings accounts.
For years Donald Heathfield, Tracey Foley and their two children lived the American dream. Then an FBI raid revealed the truth: they were agents of Putin’s Russia. Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. Their sons tell their story.
The president of Washington and Lee University, Will Dudley, understood the depth of his problem the moment he turned on the television and saw hoards of white men in collared shirts and khakis carrying tiki torches as they marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
We were listening to air escaping up through water. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder.
Invented in 1970, Mastermind would sell 30 million copies before that decade was up, and boast a national championship at the Playboy Club, a fan in Muhammed Ali, official use by the Australian military for training, and 80% ownership amongst the population of Denmark.
Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. The Confederados in Americana, Brazil, are one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.
We ended up living in northern Baja, joining the millions of people who commute between Tijuana and San Diego at the busiest international border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. Medical tourism is one of the leading industries connecting the two regions.
With its cheap geothermal energy and low crime rate, Iceland has become the world’s leading miner of digital currency. Then the crypto-crooks showed up. The thieves weren’t robbing banks. They were stealing the presses that print digital money.
Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorize. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.
Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions. Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it and trying to figure out where she’s hiding.
For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?
It’s not about foreign trolls, filter bubbles or fake news. If there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Technology encourages us to believe we can all have first-hand access to the ‘real’ facts – and now we can’t stop fighting about it.
Citing the fact that Keith Raniere had a cast of girlfriends, the media declared that Nxivm was not a self-improvement company at all but rather a “sex-slave cult.” A federal investigation was opened, culminating in Mexican police officers plucking Raniere from a pricey villa.
In Bali, western immigrants are selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met. Welcome to the world of dropshipping. Dropshipping is a “fulfillment” method.
Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that life’s most difficult questions have one right answer. While there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.
I thought about food all day; I woke up at night thinking about sausage rolls, pizza, roast chicken with crisp, lemon-rubbed skin. Food friends and foes drew into two distinct camps in my mind, and I saw ill-health at every turn and in every mouthful. I became fearful and thin. I had found wellness. I was not well.
Many US-based companies continue to consign their moderators to the margins, shipping their platforms’ digital waste to “special economic zones” in the Global South. The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech.
The stunning emergence of a new type of superconductivity with the mere twist of a carbon sheet has left physicists giddy, and its discoverer nearly overwhelmed.
Lynx Vilden is a 54-year-old British expat who, for most of her adult life, has lived wholly off the grid. She doesn’t have cell service or WiFi. Until about ten years ago, Lynx also possessed no credit card, nor fixed address; her previous abodes had neither electricity nor running water.
We all feel hungry before dinner and full after a banquet, but those moments are the tip of the iceberg. Hunger is a process that’s always present, always running in the background, only occasionally rising into consciousness. It’s more like a mood.
Miners now pouring into Eastern Washington are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale.
Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time. “I find the real business world to be a lot more difficult than horse racing.”
Around 60 people in the world share a condition called “highly superior autobiographical memory”. They remember absolutely everything. The extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory.
The percentage of 12-to-17-year-olds who had experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year shot up from 8 percent to 13 percent. Among girls, the rate was even higher; in 2017, one in five reported experiencing major depression. Here’s what we can do about it.
Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up with productivity. Until, it turns out, they don’t anymore. The unwinding of this agreement in recent decades, such that workers must continue to produce more without expecting it to show up in their pay stubs, has now been the subject of a good deal of discussion and debate.
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
Sabika Sheikh, a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan with dreams of changing the world, struck up an unlikely friendship with an evangelical Christian girl. The two became inseparable—until the day a fellow student opened fire.
The Glen Grey Act was the first piece of legislation to enshrine in law the residential separation of the races. It was also the basis for the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913, which in its final form allocated a mere thirteen percent of all arable land to the black majority.
George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went.
