How one company is rethinking the business of sex toys.

Jonathan Blow is both the video game industry’s most cynical critic and its most ambitious game developer. As he finishes his indescribable game-opus, a trip inside the head of a videogame auteur.

A profile of Kanye West.

An anonymous essay on time spent in “protective custody” at a Nazi camp.

I’ve grown, over the last few months, the beginnings of concerned; he’s started to suffer bouts of malaise. Nothing too regular, or too terrible: mild stomach aches, sore joints, general lethargy. In anyone else, it could be anything, etc. In Chad, I grow attuned to the slightest variation in temperature, to the distracted look behind his eyes when food isn’t sitting with him.

How Don Johnson won $15 million playing blackjack over a four-month period.

A profile of thriller writer Harlan Coben and what it takes to succeed as a novelist even when the literary establishment doesn’t acknowledge your existence.

It’s rare that a magazine article really introduces you to a whole brand new idea. This piece is ostensibly a profile of Bill Cosby, but it’s much more profoundly an introduction to the notion of a “black conservative” political tradition. Not a tradition of African-Americans being aligned with the (white-dominated) mainstream American conservative movement, but a separate black conservative tradition within the African-American community that serves as a counterpoint to the liberal integrationist tradition. Once I started to see this, it really changed around how I think about the meaning of political ideology.

- M. Yglesias

Dikembe Mutombo, humanitarian and former NBA center, and oil executive Kase Lawal arrange a ill-fated deal to buy $30 million in gold in Kenya.

The landmark article that changed the way communities were policed:

This wish to “decriminalize” disreputable behavior that “harms no one”- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order—is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.

On the ever-expanding world of targeted online advertising.

A visit to the newly on-the-market Jamesburg Earth Station, a massive satellite receiver that played a key role in communications with space, and its neighbors in an adjacent trailer park.