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.
Inigo Philbrick made his money betting big on a rise in price for a few artists, notably Stingel, who is known for his seemingly endless series of indistinguishable paintings of wallpaper, and Wool, whose most famous text painting fittingly spells out the word FOOL.
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.
A dizzying array of variables affects a portfolio of debt’s true potential — the age of the debt, how many agencies have tried to collect on it, the size of the balances, the type of credit card, where the debtors live and the current economic climate.
It’s among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula.
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.
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.
New York midwife Elizabeth Catlin faces 95 individual felony counts at her upcoming trial. For what? For doing her job. Politics and patriarchy make the work of many credentialed, experienced midwives illegal — to the detriment of women and underserved communities.
As a society we have historically been willing to incur costs to save lives. Government forces carmakers to reduce air pollution to help people with asthma, and the price of cars goes up. Laws prevent factories from polluting to save fisheries, and goods cost more. But that kind of tradeoff clearly has limits.
Progress is dynamic, self-generating, unpredictable. Poverty is static, effectively resourceless, subject to interests that are not its own, therefore valuable to those interests.
New high-resolution satellites, AIs, and data tools are going to let us study Earth, and ourselves, in greater detail than ever before. That’s going to come with “unthinkable” problems.
Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it.
Tonya Crowder still dreams that she and her fiance, Roosevelt Myles—who’s been in prison for decades fighting what he says is a wrongful conviction—will one day build a life together somewhere “nice, quiet, and simple.”
As the coronavirus continues to kill thousands each day, tech companies are seizing the opportunity to extend their reach and power. Towards a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone.
Thomas Mair shot and stabbed the British MP as she made her way to a constituency surgery at the local library in Birstall, West Yorkshire, on 16 June 2016, a week before the EU referendum. He told the two police officers who arrested him that he was a “political activist”.
Jeff Pike, the head of the infamous Texas-based Bandidos motorcycle club, went on trial in federal court for racketeering. Prosecutors called him a ruthless killer, the man behind one of the deadliest biker shootouts in American history at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Pike, however, said he was just a good family man.
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.
One day, Michael Shattuck started to run. He liked it, so he ran longer, sometimes for as many as 65 hours each week. He never wanted to stop. What was he running from?
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.
Tom Justice put the $20 and $100 bills into paper bags and discarded them in alleys where he knew homeless people would find them. He took all the $2 bills and hid them in the bushes outside his apartment, then watched as kids discovered the money and screamed and giggled.
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.
The military wants future super-soldiers to control robots with their thoughts. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.
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.
The ability to make and keep even one close friend has been seen as vital to children’s well-being for more than half a century. What has changed is that we now understand at a biological and even evolutionary level why that is so.
Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money or receive a state pension. But large parts of the world’s population still live off the map.
From central Iowa radio pioneer to alleged scam artist. Money didn’t always belong to Tirrell, according to numerous court judgments against him. He defrauded eight people out of $1.5 million.
Warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
Months of drought and high temperatures pushed the country to one of its worst-ever wildfire seasons. On New Year’s Eve the terrified citizens of New South Wales saw a glimpse of Australia’s new future.
For more than four decades, Page Six has ruled the world of gossip about the famous and powerful. In an era when celebrities control the narrative and “power” is a dirty word, can it survive?
Virtually every Amish victim I spoke to—mostly women but also several men—told me they were dissuaded by their family or church leaders from reporting their abuse to police or had been conditioned not to seek outside help. Some victims said they were intimidated and threatened with excommunication.
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.
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?
Coastal states have developed statewide systems to keep their recreational and subsistence harvesters safe from paralytic shellfish poisoning. Alaska has no such system. State environmental health officials say the sheer length of its coast makes monitoring shellfish for the toxin impossible.
Twenty years later, it is still a byword for New Labour hubris, squandered resources and hideously bungled planning. In fact, it was a byword for all of these things before it even opened. It is clear that the prevailing narrative that the Dome was a total failure is not – or at least not quite – the full story.
After a trial that dominated the news, the accused were all found not guilty. But the case had tapped into a deeper rage that has not died down. The #MeToo movement was in full flow, and women from all over the island of Ireland were telling painful stories of sexual humiliations at the hands of men.
Humans, not algorithms, determine those ubiquitous scores. The Tomatometer is run by a team of “curators” who read just about every known review from a gigantic pool of approved critics, then decide if each is positive or negative. Once a movie has five reviews, it is Tomatometer-eligible.
Most of the rapid cognitive enhancers currently being peddled are not very effective. Brain-training games like Lumosity and Posit Science (Brain HQ) won’t boost your IQ, but a host of strategies can improve your cognitive abilities one piece at a time.
As one of the northernmost settlements on earth, the Norwegian hamlet of Longyearbyen has become a magnet for adventurous souls looking to start a new life. But when an unsettling crime happened, it brought home a harsh reality: in the modern world, trouble always finds you.
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.
The fight over preserving public land during the Trump era is taking a strange, angry twist in Montana’s Crazy Mountains. Both sides are armed.
Moscow is growing belligerent in its quest to pry open the icy route to the Atlantic. The U.S. and Britain are racing to catch up, but is it too late?
