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.”
“The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here.”
The former chancellor of New York City schools was not, in fact, “a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.”
Mina Kimes is a writer for Fortune.
"A lot of people have asked me about my attitudes towards capitalism, or Wall Street in general. You know, there are companies on Wall Street that are doing good things, and there are companies on Wall Street that are doing bad things. At Fortune, our job is to look at both, and to explain why. I think in many cases, when it comes to the ones that are doing bad things, it takes people like us and other financial journalists to expose and question them."
Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!
On hypochondria.
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On the Clintons’ political future.
The Drugstore Cowboy star candidly discusses the characters who defined her career.
A profile of Jeremy Lin.
An impossible hike in Western China.
“For every other kid in the room, the science experiment probably amounts to just another classroom activity, but for the Nashes the project is a reminder of Molly’s own fight for life and the controversial cutting-edge medicine that saved her.”
On Queens’ stubbornly unchanging Roosevelt Avenue, where immigrants pay $2 a song to grind against hired dancers and shuttered houses of prostitution have given way to rolling brothel-vans.
A profile of Montana Senator Jon Tester.
How a high-speed rail disaster exposed China’s corruption.
I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it.
The tragi-comic career of a nobody comedian from the 1940s who ditched his wife, child, and eventually his own name.
Captain Iván Castro, who lost his vision in Iraq, runs the Boston Marathon.
How Barack Obama decided to green-light the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
