Longform

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

“When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers.”

Why do Ikarians live so long—and remain mentally sharp until the end?

On the novelist’s experience in movie-making.

In the 1970s, Chile was on the verge of developing sophisticated technology to monitor its economy. Then America intervened.

Profiles of people with genius-level IQs.

“From all appearances, this place is still an earthly paradise. There is just one problem, though you could stare at this palm grove for a lifetime and never see it. The soil under our feet, whitish gray in color with flecks of coral, contains a radioactive isotope called cesium 137.”

“His seeming ease belies the anxiety and emotion that advisers say he brings to his historic position: pride in what he has accomplished, determination to acquit himself well and intense frustration.”

Life at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s.

An excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

A tragic car crash, its lone survivor, and his reeling town.

Forty years after its release, the story of “Free to Be… You and Me.”

On the origins of outbreaks.

A profile of George McGovern.

In the slums adjacent to Mumbai’s airport.

Why the future feels frozen in time, as framed by Marshall McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)

We know we need it, but we don’t know why.

Life inside Long Island’s largest cluster of sex offenders.

The strange existence of the accused Internet pirate as he battles the U.S. government.

A California martial arts instructor’s secret past.

Previously: Finding Oscar

The rise and (potential) fall of the electronics superstore.

Zaranj: the bloody border of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back.”