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.
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.
Putin’s recent ubiquity has brought great prominence to the practice of Putinology. This enterprise – the production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations, based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information – has existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade.
How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp. A story of two men who became pawns of a violent group through coercion and a series of very bad decisions.
Risks Inc. is one of a few dozen private companies I had found that offer kidnap prevention and survival courses. Costs range from about $600 to a couple thousand dollars. Some are entirely in a classroom; others include role-playing.
Northern Irish paramilitary Gary Haggarty pleaded guilty to hundreds of violent crimes, including many killings – while working for the British state. They included five murders; five attempted murders; one count of aiding and abetting murder.
Evidence from Maya writing and art suggests Teotihuacan conquered Tikal outright, adding it to what some archaeologists see as a sweeping empire that may have included several Maya cities. Teotihuacan may have turned against Maya expatriates who had lived there peacefully for decades.
For years, Mormon mommy blogger Natalie Lovin curated a picture-perfect life. Natalie’s job was being a lovably quirky wife and mother who documented her idyllic life online. Then she left the church—and her husband.
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.
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.
Online, Steve Maraboli looks like the trope of a motivational speaker—photos of him speaking onstage, podcasts, apparent endorsements by celebrities, frequent mentions about best-selling books. He’s built his brand on an abundance of lies.
By the late 1960s, Georgia Power had started planning to build the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant. Over a decade later, in 1982, its first unit opened in Juliette. Now, residents worry it’s contaminating their water.
In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. An exclusive look inside the company’s top-secret Future Lab.
A mysterious mansion. A murder-suicide. Paranormal activity. This is the true story of 2475 Glendower Place. Before the Internet, it retained its anonymity, hiding at the foot of Griffith Park, at the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains. Now it’s becoming an Amityville horror for the Facebook generation.
We’ve been taught for years that as long as you hit the gym you can hit the buffet line and still lose weight. But there’s plenty of science out there to prove this statement false.
The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully.
A huge tax break was supposed to create a manufacturing paradise, but interviews with 49 people familiar with the project depict a chaotic operation unlikely to ever employ 13,000 workers.
Researchers had a hunch that Luckin Coffee, China’s fast-growing challenger to Starbucks and a company traded in the U.S. stock market, was falsifying financial statements to exaggerate its sales. A few months later, an anonymously written 89-page report landed on Wall Street and leveled one of China’s hottest startups.
Exploitation and predatory pricing drove the transformation of the US beef industry – and created the model for modern agribusiness. The industrial slaughterhouse was a triumph of human ingenuity as well as a site of brutal labor exploitation.
It isn’t every day that a street criminal—a high-school dropout with two felony convictions—is accused of stealing a centuries-old violin worth as much as $6 million. But nothing about the heist of the Lipinski Stradivarius, which galvanized the music world last winter, was normal, or even logical.
When Canadian blockchain whiz Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly last year, hundreds of millions of dollars in investor funds vanished into the crypto ether. But when the banks, the law, and the forces of Reddit tried to track down the cash, it turned out the young mogul may not have been who he purported to be.
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.
As cities become ever more packed with cameras that always see, public anonymity could disappear. Can stealth streetwear evade electronic eyes? Is there anything fashion can do to counter the erosion of public anonymity?
France is home to large Vietnamese and Cambodian communities who arrived in the country in great numbers following the wars in the former French colonies in the 1970s. People of Chinese descent have long faced prejudice and violence in France. But today a new generation is staking out its rightful place in society.
Jane de Oliveira set out to protect the world’s largest rain forest from the corporate interests that are burning it to the ground. Then the armed men showed up.
Paul Skalnik has a decadeslong criminal record and may be one of the most prolific jailhouse informants in U.S. history. The state of Florida is planning to execute a man based largely on his word.
Nowadays, sneakers aren’t just for wearing. They’re an asset class, on display at museums, and fueling an increasingly profitable resale market. Much of that traces back to Nike putting a superstar rookie’s name on a new pair of kicks in 1985.
Xinjiang, northwest China, is in a state of surveillance lockdown. Every message, word and movement is monitored for its extremist potential. A million Uyghur muslims are being held in concentration camps.
For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us.
Search and rescue teams train for the worst conditions. But the worst conditions are getting worse. Search teams are stretched. Rescuers are burning out. We are all less safe. Are search and rescue teams ready for the next big disaster?
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.
Being underestimated had been the theme of Brian Regan’s life, a curse he had borne silently since childhood. But for the mission he had now embarked upon, it was a blessing. No one in the intelligence community could have imagined that he of all people was capable of masterminding a complex espionage plot.
Traditionally, cities looking to spur their economies may offer incentives to attract businesses. Tulsa is testing out a new premise: Pay people instead. The first class of hand-picked remote workers moved to Tulsa in exchange for $10,000 and a built-in community. The city might just be luring them to stay.
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.
My bodega is only a little bigger than my studio apartment, and sells no fewer than 10 kinds of Muscle Milk. Once the niche elixir of powerlifting bros, gulping down a Muscle Milk or three is now part of a “healthy, active lifestyle” — whatever that means.
After decades of shielding the identities of accused child abusers from the public, many Catholic leaders are now releasing lists of their names. But the lists are inconsistent, incomplete and omit key details.
She tormented studio executives, actors, makeup artists, security guys, photographers, screenwriters, athletes, even bobsledders and scuba divers for years—until corporate investigator Nicoletta Kotsianas was put on the case.
News of the killing of three teenage sisters quickly spread across Russia, and in the months that followed, the country was divided over what drove the sisters to kill their own father. It inspired a campaign for change – and a backlash from the patriarchy.
In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?
Over the past 20 years or so, ad hoc coalitions of politicians, activists and conscience-stricken billionaires, have rewilded millions of acres of mostly failed agricultural and grazing land. Their guiding philosophy upends the long-dominant view that land should be cleared, plowed and wrung ever more efficiently for food.
Alpine scrambles and beach-front strolls; multi-day singletrack adventures and quick urban escapes; soaring trees and rolling sand dunes—every state in the country has something to offer intrepid hikers.
