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.”
The Case of the Mormon Historian
Michael Quinn took on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and lost.
For the last Nazi hunter, the inevitable comes into focus
Efraim Zuroff does not want to retire.
Clear Eyes, Full Plates, Can't Puke
Behind the scenes of the lovely, strange world of competitive eating.
David Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper's and contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic.
"You start by doing the thing you want to do, at whatever level you can. There's this idea that you work your way up by writing captions, and then capsule film reviews or whatever, and I don't think it works that way. I think you learn to master a form, and you start by doing the thing you want to do. At first you're not going to do it as well as you wish you could, and then you learn. At the same time, I think, there's so much dreck, and there's so many people who don't care about doing the thing well, that when that kid walks in your door and they want to do the thing, you say 'Sure,' because it doesn't cost you anything, you look at it, and there's actually some energy on the page, like, yeah, it's bad, but it's bad in a different way. It's bad in the way of someone who might eventually be good."
Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!
Wild Things
Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos.
How Do You Raise a Prodigy?
The challenges of parenting genius.
Sponsored
Sponsor: Aeon Magazine
Only a handful of animals in the world can be tamed, but that can’t stop a homesick 15-year-old girl from trying.
In “A Raccoon of My Own,” new in Aeon Magazine, American psychologist and best-selling writer Lauren Slater recalls an exquisitely painful time in her youth, when, cast adrift from home herself, she adopted a baby raccoon. Her relationship with “Amelia” blossomed—one creature adapting to, and learning from the other. But Amelia’s wild instincts could not be contained in suburban domestic life, as Lauren was soon to realize.
Read it in Aeon Magazine—a new digital magazine publishing daily essays on ideas, culture and science.
Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?
Blockbusters in the age of “corporate irony.”
Interview: Elizabeth Gilbert
“There’s a lot of disorder that comes along with wanting to know everything and wanting to try everything and wanting to experience everything, but there’s a lot of knowledge that comes out of it too.”
The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon
Adventures in bartending.
Resurrection
Becoming a priest in Boston amidst a sex abuse scandal and church closings.
The Plot to Destroy America's Beer
The future of beer behemoth AB InBev.
Hacking the President’s DNA
On the potential existence of personalized bioweapons, which could attack a single individual without leaving a trace, and how they might be stopped.
Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither Was Jonah Lehrer.
The allure of conclusion-shaping and a wunderkind’s fall.
Mourning Glory
A high school baseball team responds to a loss.
State of the Species
The future of homo sapiens.
