Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Down and Out at the Hotel Providence
Scenes from a Bowery flophouse.
Amanda Hess, a staff writer at Slate, has also written for Pacific Standard, GOOD, and ESPN the Magazine.
"I ended up not loving the fact that I was getting a bunch of calls from MSNBC and CNN, who mostly wanted to talk about people threatening to rape and kill me and only a tiny bit about the story I'd written. ... It was tiring, and it seemed dismissive of me as a person. It's a strange thing to become somebody else's story, especially when the story is: You're a victim of an insane online harasser. That's who you are."
Thanks to this week's sponsors, TinyLetter and Oyster Books.
"This Is Not a Barbie Doll. This Is an Actual Human Being."
A profile of Valeria Lukyanova, otherwise known as the “Human Barbie.”
What Happened To Jai Alai?
Jai Alai once packed Florida’s frontons with gamblers and glamor. Today, America is down to a single top-level pro who plays under the name Tevin in honor of Tevin Campbell.
Burning Out
The last days of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Birdie Africa: The Lost Boy
What happened to the only child who survived the 1985 MOVE bombing.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is Your Favorite Author's Favorite Author
The downside of opening up.
Over Easy
“That educated women’s eggs are in demand is one thing, that they are willing to provide them is another.”
The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance
Cassie Chadwick pulled her first con in 1870, at the age of 13. Over the next 30 years, she would scam her way to $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.
Crossing Chris Christie
On the mechanics of New Jersey state politics.
One Small Store
Two men, separated by more than 150 years, discover the folly of attempting Western-style capitalism in Micronesia.
The Color of His Presidency
A case for why race has been the real story of the Obama presidency all along.
The Islamic Sex Cult Supporting Turkey's Prime Minister
Inside Harun Yahya, which promotes a “sexed-up Disney version of Islam,” publishes a 800-page creationist atlas, runs a surreal TV station, and has films it members in orgies that often include high-ranking politicians.
In the Strawberry Fields
Migrant workers in California and the consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy.
Fight for Wright
The mysterious death of Alfred Wright in the shadow of a town’s history of racial violence.
Peter Matthiessen’s Homegoing
Stolen time with the writer as he neared the end.
The Most Trafficked Mammal You've Never Heard Of
Following the hunters and poachers, servers and saviors of the little-known pangolin—a scaly, endangered creature sold by the thousands on the black market.
How the Secret Police Tracked My Childhood
The author relives her Romanian youth and the imprisonment of her father through the Securitate files kept on her family.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?"
An addict navigates 1980s Detroit.
Back in the Day
On Michael Jackson’s talent.
“U Want Me 2 Kill Him?”
A teenager orchestrates his own attempted murder via an Internet chatroom.
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U.S. Secretly Created 'Cuban Twitter' to Stir Unrest
An investigation into the ill-fated text messaging platform ZunZuneo.
The New Face of Heroin
A dispatch from Vermont, which is in the midst of what the governor calls a “full-blown heroin crisis.”
