Sinners in the Hands
A small Texas town suddenly finds it’s the home of a possible cult.
Digging for Their Lives
With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.
Janet Malcolm: The Art of Nonfiction No. 4
“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”
The Final Confessions of a Silk Road Kingpin
How a 40-year-old IT consultant became nod, one of Silk Road’s highest volume heroin dealers, who turned informant and then fugitive.
A Sense of Who You Are
How fight coach Greg Jackson, once dubbed “the Philosopher King of MMA,” does his job.
Tom's Wild Years
Tom Waits interviewed at 38.
A Fish for Our Time
After being extinct for 70 million years, the coelacanth came back to life.
Our Man in Africa
Decades later, U.S.-backed dictator Hissène Habré faces justice.
Untested. Unregulated. Unsafe?
The rise of an expensive, experimental stem-cell treatment in China and the medical tourism it attracts.
This Is Danny Pearl’s Final Story
Investigating the murder of a friend and colleague.
The Man Who Disappeared
At one time, a whole generation of New York Times reporters wished they could write like McCandlish Phillips. Then he left them all for God.
Lonnie Holley, the Insider’s Outsider
The improbable life and career of the sculptor-turned-musician.
So Money
An oral history of Swingers.
The Longform Guide to Gary Shteyngart
This guide is sponsored by Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure, the best-seller published this month by Random House. Hailed as a "memoir for the ages" by Mary Karr, Little Failure tells the story of Shteyngart's American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. Buy it today.</p>
Should you need further convincing, here is a collection of some of Shteyngart's best non-fiction:</em>
The Sordid End of David Meggett
Meggett was an All-Pro running back for the New York Giants. He was also a serial rapist.
Roger D. Hodge is the editor of Oxford American.
"My career isn't all that interesting insofar as I've been an editor. I'm much more interested in talking about writers and stories. That's the main thing: telling these stories, creating this platform, this context for the best possible storytelling."
Thanks to TinyLetter and Random House for sponsoring this week's episode.
The Secret Double Life of Mister Cee, Hip-Hop's Most Beloved DJ
A profile of the Hot 97 DJ a few months after “he told the truth about who he is, even if it’s not entirely clear—even to Mister Cee himself, even now, to this day—what exactly that truth is.”
Snapshots of the Underground
Moe Tucker narrates her time drumming in the Velvet Underground.
Sponsored
Sponsor: "Little Failure" by Gary Shteyngart
Our sponsor this week is Little Failure, the new memoir by Gary Shteyngart. Already a New York Times bestseller, Little Failure tells the story of Shteyngart's American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own.
Mary Karr called Little Failure "a memoir for the ages." The Millions dubbed Shteyngart the "Chekhov-Roth-Apatow of Queens." And Nathan Eglander said the book is so honest "Dr. Freud would be proud."
Buy Little Failure today or read an exclusive excerpt on Longform.
Sad YouTube
Finding personal stories buried deep in the YouTube comments.
In The Name Of Love
How “Do What You Love” devalues actual work.
What Grantland Got Wrong
On the problems in “Dr. V’s Magical Putter.”
Aspen and the End of Snow
How the ski town of the super-rich is responding to global warming.
On Breaking One's Neck
A physician reports on his own catastrophic injury.
The Longform Guide to Pills
A collection of picks about the pills we swallow and the people who make them, take them and sell them.</p>
