Longform

On Jenny Craig’s European expansion and how dieting differs in France and the States.

On the complex nature of a presidential second term and what Obama would do if he wins one.

I am gay. I am Mormon. I am married to a woman. I am happy every single day. My life is filled with joy. I have a wonderful sex life. And I’ve been married for ten years, and plan to be married for decades more to come to the woman of my dreams.

Shiva Ayyadurai told the world he invented email. Not everyone agreed.

A former sex worker interviews a longtime John on how it feels to pay for it.

The Watergate reporters look back.

In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

A profile of the Hollywood star-maker behind Vanna White, Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy.

An interview with John Waters.

Real life is seeing and art is looking. If you’re successful, it’s a magic trick: you take one thing, and you put it in here, and it changes in one second, and then you can never look at that thing again the same way. That is what art is to me.

On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.

The international battle over 17 tons of coins discovered by an American deep-sea treasure hunting company.

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

On the shifting nature of time.

Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the radical activist “beyond the leading edge” of the same-sex marriage fight.

The story of Christopher and Jeffrey George, the twin proprietors of a pain clinic empire.

John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed.

A decade-long Internet hoax unravels.

A trip to Disneyland in the mid-1960s.

Previously posted on Longform.org on January 25th, 2012.

How Google’s utopian/dystopian plan to scan the world’s books failed and the Harvard-led team that’s picking up the pieces.

The Horace Mann School’s secret history of sexual abuse.

An ode to professional basketball players and why pro ball is the best ball of all.

“Strong-arm methods, including murder, are common in the illicit narcotics traffic. After a major international narcotics ring was broken up last year, two of the- twenty-four defendants were murdered before completion of the trial. One was shot down in the Bronx; the burned body of the other was found near Rochester, New York. The business executive, factory worker, and housewife never encounter the seamy side, but this is what their bets are financing. Again I ask, Is this really the way the American people want it to be?”

Teaching Ted Kaczynski’s anti-technology ideas.

The Penn State sex abuse scandal as told through a father, a son and “Victim 1.”