“Editing is crucial because in my experience anything you try to make - what YOU want is for the story to be AMAZING. But what the story wants to be is MEDIOCRE OR WORSE. And the entire process of making the story is convincing the story to not be what it wants to be, which is BAD.”
The murder of Mickey Bryan stunned her small Texas town. Then her husband was charged with killing her. Did he do it, or had there been a terrible mistake?
“There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend.”
The opioid’s potency has transformed the global trafficking—and policing—of narcotics.
On the front lines of the labor movement.
How the Congressional baseball shooting didn’t become the deadliest political assassination in American history.
The story of suck.com.
The anti-trust saga of Microsoft and Netscape.
Doug Schifter waged a one-man campaign to stop Uber from putting his fellow black-car drivers out of business. Then he decided to take his own life.
“My dad’s whole idea was to do an amusement park differently, not where you just got strapped in and twisted around, but one where you controlled what was going on. You can have an awesome time, but you can also hurt yourself if you don’t use good judgment.”
How the godfather of “fratire” went from chronicling his drunken sexual conquests to ghostwriting Tiffany Haddish’s memoir.
Two brothers and the opioid epidemic around Pittsburgh.
Engineer and adventurer Richard Jenkins has made oceangoing robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and environmental science. His aim: a thousand of them.
A working theory about what makes internet writing uniquely “internetty.”
A profile of the Talking Heads frontman.
One of the world’s most hazardous jobs is known for its intense pressure.
The lives of a bell maker, a beekeeper, and their observant son.
The life of one of America’s bloodiest hitmen.
A law-enforcement official released the documents after finding that additional suspicious transactions did not appear in a government database.
How the 9.9 percent became “the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”
Sheila Heti is the author of seven books. Her latest is Motherhood: A Novel.
“[My parents] were afraid for me. As anybody who has a kid who wants to be a writer. I think they understood it was a hard life. It was a life in which you wouldn’t necessarily make enough money. It was a life in which you might be setting yourself up for a great amount of disappointment. My dad’s father was a painter, so there was in him this idea that it wasn’t so crazy to him. It wasn’t so outside his understanding. And, yeah, my mom thought it was a bad idea. And it probably is a bad idea in a lot of ways, but my dad was supportive but also cautioning. I think the book really moved [my mom] and really had an effect on her, so maybe you understand that it’s not necessarily a frivolous thing to be doing. Maybe it’s not just playing. I think my mom always had this idea that writing is playing, and it is playing, but it’s a serious kind of playing.”
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The wondrous—and occasionally weird—relationship between the children’s-music superstar, his fans, and the man he used to be.
The people bringing psychedelic drugs into the mental health mainstream.
To make sense of the Special Counsel, you have to revisit some of the bloodiest battles of Vietnam.
How a scandal started with a poor housemaid and ended up taking down the most powerful woman in Africa
