Devils, Deals and the DEA
How agents took down Mexico’s most vicious drug cartel and, in the process, gave El Chapo the opportunity to create an empire.
Everything Gone but the Water
The wild fire that consumed Harbin Hot Springs, a legendary clothing-optional resort in Northern California.
ISIS Is a Revolution
An ethnography.
In Danger
The life and death of a gorilla named Julia.
What Would Cool Jesus Do?
Sundays at Hillsong, the church that saved Justin Bieber.
Sweet Success
How the Mast Brothers fooled people into paying $10 a bar for mediocre chocolate, and how a food blogger was able to figure it out.
The Banner Campaign
How a disgruntled group of University of Miami football fans got the head coach fired by flying insulting airplane banners high over Sun Life Stadium.
Miami Underwater
South Florida and the danger of the rising sea.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Fire Was Coming"
Religion, high school football, and racial problems in small town America.
The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage.
Google and Tesla are spending billions to develop driverless technology. George Hotz used an Acura.
Kliph Nesteroff writes for WFMU's Beware of the Blog. His book, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy, was released in November.
“Well, comedy always becomes stale. Whether it’s offensive or not offensive, it has an expiry date, unfortunately. A lot of people don’t want to hear this because that means a lot of their favorite comedians suddenly become irrelevant. But that’s the history of comedy: the hippest, coolest guy today—whoever that is to you in comedy—50 years from now, the new generation is going to say, ‘That guy’s not funny, and he’s square.’ And they’re going to say, ‘This new young guy is funny.’ But in another 50 years that guy becomes the square who isn’t funny. And it’s not that they weren’t funny and everybody was wrong; it was that that person was relating to their time.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Casper, Squarespace , and CreativeLive for sponsoring this week's episode. If you would like to pitch in, please become a Longform Supporter.
Playboy Interview: Frank Sinatra
“I don’t know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation. I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I’ve been there—and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me. They can’t help it. Sentimentality, after all, is an emotion common to all humanity.”
The First Black Trans Model Had Her Face on a Box of Clairol
No one knew her secret. Until they did.
Longform's Best of 2015
We recommended 1,453 articles this year, from 1,210 writers and 360 publications. They were read nearly 20 million times.
Medical Mountaineers
What it takes to deliver basic medical care to the most remote corners of the Himalayas.
Dispossessed in the Land of Dreams
Suzan Russaw is 70 years old. She lived in affordable Palo Alto housing for decades. Then, in 2013, she was forced to move into her car. On the new homeless of Silicon Valley.
Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking
On the unexpected longevity of a very strange theory.
What the Hell Happened to Mickey Kaus?
One of the first lefty political bloggers has no job, mostly tweets, and thinks Donald Trump has it right on immigration.
Unpregnant
An essay on the silent, secret grief of miscarriage.
The Deported
Kelvin Villanueva had lived in America for 15 years. He had four kids. He had a job. Then he was stopped for a broken taillight.
Random Roles: Ted Danson
Fargo, Damages, Cheers, and Leslie Nielsen’s fart machine.
The Body Snatchers
The murky ethics of crowdsourcing an organ donation.
Eddie Davison's Life Sentence
Eddie Davison sued New York for locking him up under a false premise. Now the state says he owes $2 million.
The Machiavelli of Maryland
Edward Luttwak is a military strategist, a classical scholar, a cattle rancher, and an adviser to presidents, prime ministers, and the Dalai Lama.
The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude
The origin story of Gabriel García Márquez’s classic.
