The Mastermind

Paul Le Roux could have been Mark Zuckerberg. Instead he became a 21st century John Gotti, running a massive criminal empire from his computer until he became an asset of the United States government.

A 7-part serialized story, written by Longform Podcast co-host Evan Ratliff.

  1. Episode 1: An Arrogant Way of Killing

  2. Episode 2: I'm Your Boss Now

  3. Episode 3: He Always Had a Dark Side

  4. Episode 4: Absolute Fear

  5. Episode 5: He Got Greedy

  6. Episode 6: Eyes Everywhere

  7. Episode 7: The Next Big Deal

The Picture In The House

After being caught in a downpour, a traveler takes refuge in the home of a twisted old man; Happy Halloween.

"As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened."

Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

The author ("media inventor" Robin Sloan) describes this as a "short story about recession, attraction, and data visualization."

"That night, at the bookstore, I started working on the new visualization, thinking I could impress Kat with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype."

My Life as a Bibliophile

On collecting books.

I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realised there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a reader's head.

Every Thing In It

Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.

One of the things you learn is that “polymath” doesn’t even begin to describe Silverstein. His creativity extended in so many directions that his archivists must be versed not just in turn-of-the-century world children’s literature, but Waylon Jennings’s deep cuts; not just in reel-to-reel tape preservation, but how to keep an old restaurant napkin scribbled with lyrics from falling apart.

The Long Voyage

On New Year's Eve, a man sits by a fire, reading and recalling accounts of exotic and perilous journeys.

"Why does this traveller's fate obscure, on New Year's Eve, the other histories of travellers with which my mind was filled but now, and cast a solemn shadow over me! Must I one day make his journey? Even so. Who shall say, that I may not then be tortured by such late regrets: that I may not then look from my exile on my empty place and undone work?"