Longform

Life behind the Beatles curtain, with the man whose real name is actually Richard Starkey.

One famous critic (Adler) takes another (Pauline Kael) to task for a collection of reviews that is “without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

On Kendall Jenner, public versus private lives, and the American Dream.

A story of the very complicated demographics of small-town life.

"But I’m no country bumpkin, let me tell you. Cultural institutions in Spencer include a glass studio, a community theater, and a bona fide art school, which relocated in 2008 from the city of Detroit, which as you might have guessed, did not make the cut for Relocate-America.com’s Top 100 Places to Live for 2007. Hence, the art school moving to Spencer. If you’re wondering how a city gets on the list, it says on Relocate-America.com’s website that theirs is the “only list that is determined by statistics and feedback of the people who live, work & play in these communities.” So basically, they take in consideration both fact and opinion and process them in a secret formula to produce a totally non-biased ranking based not just on numbers but also on the enthusiasm of Real People Who Definitely Live There. This explains why we are only three slots down from San Francisco, California on the rankings, because we are definitely on par with a major metropolitan, ocean-bordering melting pot with a majority-minority population of close to a million people where it Doesn’t Snow Ever; anyone who’s ever been to Spencer, Iowa can attest to that."

The author discovers devastating secrets while going through her late father’s belongings.

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos and director of the series finale, analyzes the final scene shot-by-shot.

The double life of Aaron Hernandez.

The complicated class politics of American eating habits.

On his anxiety as a teenager, the treatment he was given for it, and the way that the psychiatry of the day failed his family.

On the parallel sadness of Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop.

The woman that the mixed martial arts star beat nearly to death tells her side of the story.

The man who killed John Wilkes Booth was a eunuch. By choice.

The writer’s obsession with a genus of snake known as “indigo.”

Tracing the 3,339 miles the Canadian ran in 1980, on one good leg and one prosthetic limb.

John Barrymore once had a totem pole on his Beverly Hills estate. But where did it come from?

Joan Didion versus the boys on the bus:

American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is one reason why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported.

An interview with the author, who died Monday.

The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.

In 1965, a mother was charged with killing her 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter in Queens. Fifty years later, it still isn’t clear if she did it.

Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls.

Everyone just wants to know if he’s going to the football game.

The process of claiming a loved one’s body after a massacre at a Kenyan university.

A mystery embedded deep within the Amazon.

Doug Dodd was a drug kingpin in high school. And now, like the narrator of a Scorcese film, he wants to tell his own story.