The Greatest Team That Never Was
Dunks, drugs, and disappointment: an oral history of the 1980s Houston Rockets.
Genius: The Nickelback Story
How a loathsome band makes gobs of money.
Uncovering the Truth Behind the Myth of Pancho Villa, Movie Star
The revolutionary and the silver screen.
Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee's Heart of Darkness
Why is an anti-virus software giant in the Belizean jungle surrounded by gang members?
The Man Who Smelled Too Much
William Nowell got a windfall and got off the streets. The only problem were his neighbors – and his odor.
Book Shopping with the Best-Read Man in America
Browsing the stacks with The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda.
Rio: The Fight for the Favelas
On the experimental favela police force UPP (aka “The Big Skull”) and their efforts to clean Rio’s largest slum in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.
Jonah Weiner, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, pop critic at Slate, and contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.
"The thing that I've found useful is really actually to delete everything that I've written and go at it fresh, and re-envision it again: this is going to be my new lede now. That's really the best way to do it, because if there are these vestigial sentences, and vestigial sequences or paragraphs that are in the draft, for me, that's just going to snap me back to where my head was at, in an unproductive way ... Often, I'll find that that is just this great cure-all. Just delete it all, go for a walk or whatever, and then sit down and start writing an entirely different feature about the exact same subject."
Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!
Playboy Interview: Stephen Colbert
An out-of-character conversation.
What Happened to Michelle in Forest Hills?
Behind the tabloid story of the “murder orphan” in Queens.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
How America used to vote.
Come On, Feel the Buzz
On Politico’s brand of insider journalism.
The Fifth Problem
How Moscow State university discriminated against Jewish applicants using deceptively simple problems.
In Cold Type
The backstory of “The Duke in His Domain,” Truman Capote’s 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando.
Murder of an Idealist
The life and last days of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Love on the March
On the gay community’s political progress.
Spellbinder
At various points, Thomas Mitchell was a novelist, an attorney, a scientist, a Hollywood dealmaker and a CIA higher-up. He was also a con man.
The Strange Love of Dr. Billy James Hargis
How a Tulsa preacher used direct mail to create the American religious right.
Biafra: A People Betrayed
“Biafra lost its freedom, of course, and I was in the middle of it as all its fronts were collapsing. I flew in from Gabon on the night of January 3, with bags of corn, beans, and powdered milk, aboard a blacked out DC6 chartered by Caritas, the Roman Catholic relief organization. I flew out six nights later on an empty DC4 chartered by the French Red Cross. It was the last plane to leave Biafra that was not fired upon.”
Slash and Burn
The rise of One Direction fanfiction that imagines the band members in relationships – with each other.
A White Buffalo's Death Breeds Suspicion and Lies
Money, fraud and a sacred prophecy.
This Movie Is Rated Wu
A profile of RZA, hip-hop artist and kung fu film director.
Light Entertainment
An essay on Jimmy Savile, British television and child sexual abuse.
The Un-Communicator
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, profiled.
A Gated Community
Each year, thousands of people pay to play eighteen holes of golf at Angola, “the largest maximum-security prison in the country.”
