Longform

A Houston man allegedly tries to hire several hit men to kill his wife. Each fails miserably. It becomes the talk of the town.

As mainstream news loses its relevance, Allred becomes only more relevant to mainstream news. She’s provided thousands of hours of titillating material that has helped keep cable networks from grinding to a halt. The players come and go. Past clients like Amber Frey and Tiger Woods Mistress No. 1 Rachel Uchitel slip back into obscurity. Scott Peterson rots disregarded on death row in San Quentin, and Woods’s sexual escapades no longer mesmerize. But Allred retains her significance. There are always new victims to premiere and promote, new serial sexual harassers or psychopaths to square off against. In this spectacle of scandal, grisly murder, and celebrity wrongdoing, Allred has made herself the stage manager, the content provider, the indispensable performer.

Clarence Thomas, then-chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, profiled by Juan Williams:

He agrees with Reagan's characterization of the civil-rights leaders as old men fomenting discontent to justify their own "rather good positions." "The issue is economics—not who likes you." Thomas has told me. "And when you have the economics, people do have a way of changing their attitudes toward you. I don't see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own. Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?"

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

Previously: “Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class”

A survivor’s frightening account.

How black market mining is destroying the Peruvian rain forest and enslaving child workers.

Reviewing Newt Gingrich as historian and intellectual.

How one of the most maligned cast members in SNL history ended up a talking head on Fox News.

Terrell ‘T.O’ Owens is 38, currently unemployed, nearly bankrupt after losing his shirt in a electronic-bingo entertainment complex development plan gone bust, father of four children (one of which he has never met), and bowls frequently.

On the scandal of our teeming prisons.

On the French urban exploration group UX—”sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself.”

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone work.

A group of misfit boys from the fringes of Las Vegas form a clique. Then, with murky motives, they decide to murder one of their own and bury him in a desert pit.

Hanging out in Moscow with Russia’s yuppie, 20-something journalist revolutionaries:

In other words, the protest was being brought to you by the same people you would have relied on, weeks earlier, for restaurant picks.

The state of the American cockfight.

On Patti Smith.

It was easy for lazy journalists to caricature her as a stringbean who looked like Keith Richards, emitted Dylanish word salads, and dropped names—a high-concept tribute act of some sort, very wet behind the ears. But then her first album, Horses, came out in November 1975, and silenced most of the scoffers.

How the game gets made.

An interview with the former president about the upcoming election and American consensus.

A reporter makes it his mission to track down all 42 members of a platoon after their service in Iraq.

A report from the oil boom in North Dakota, where unemployment is 3.4 percent and McDonald’s gives out $300 signing bonuses.

A profile of Harold Hamm, oil baron.

A profile of the Final Exit Network’s former medical director:

In those final seconds before his patients lose consciousness and die, the words they utter sound like Donald Duck, he says, imitating the high-pitched, nasally squeak familiar to any child who has sucked a gulp from a helium balloon. So, this is how a human being can leave this Earth? Sounding like Donald Duck?

"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.  A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."

But now, being a celebrity yourself, you feel differently? I've subsequently changed my opinion. Brad Pitt doesn't have a superpower at his back. He just has some crazed fans and paparazzi. But now, having had all three, I must say, I'm not terribly impressed with the experience.