Longform

How an increase in the earth’s temperature could wipe out a continent.

A profile of legendary Houston socialite Becca Cason Thrash.

How information replicates, mutates, and evolves.

A profile of celebrity astrophysicist Neil Tyson.

A memory of interviewing the late great songwriter Townes Van Zandt shortly before his death.

The dissolution of Brooklyn softcore skin-mag Jacques and the marriage of the couple that created it.

The phrase “knew how to wear clothes” is a loaded one. To “know how to wear clothes” is another way of saying that Cary Grant embodied class, which is to say high class: Grant wore well-tailored clothes, and he knew how to hold himself in them. But he came from nothing, and the way he wore clothes was just as much of a performance as his refined trans-Atlantic accent, his acrobatic slapstick routines, and his masterful flirtation skills.

On “If You Are the One”, the smash hit Chinese dating show that raised the ire of censors.

A profile.

Because business ebbs and flows with the seasons and the economy, Holmes, who lives in Upper Marlboro, has always kept a variety of sidelines, including a job driving a limousine for nine years to put his oldest daughter through a private high school and college. These days, at gigs, he hands out a stack of million-dollar "bills" printed with his image and his current enterprises: bandleader, commercial mortgage broker, hard money lender (slogan: "Hard Money with a Soft Touch").

A step-by-step proposal for fixing the broken economics of big-time college sports.

The writer contemplates beauty and identity following reconstructive surgery.

There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected just how omnipresent are our own images. I began by merely avoiding mirrors, but by the end of the year I found myself with an acute knowledge of the reflected image, its numerous tricks and wiles, how it can spring up at any moment: a glass tabletop, a well-polished door handle, a darkened window, a pair of sunglasses, a restaurant’s otherwise magnificent brass-plated coffee machine sitting innocently by the cash register.

How an up-and-coming Boston surgeon became best known for leaving a patient on the operating table while he skipped out to cash a check.

Tim Masters becomes the main suspect in a gruesome Colorado murder; he’s eventually convicted thanks the work of a revered detective. Then the case unravels: DNA proves another man committed the crime.

The story of eight young people who died in a New Orleans squat fire.

The transcript from an lecture presented by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm, on the ethics of drones, military robots, and cyborg soldiers.

On the science of parking spaces.

On a child diagnosed with autism:

The worst part was that I knew he sensed it, too. In the same way that I know when he wants vegetable puffs or puréed fruit by the subtle pitch of his cries, I could tell that he also perceived the change—and feared it. At night he was terrified to go to bed, needing to hold my fingers with one hand and touch my face with the other in order to get the few hours of sleep he managed. Every morning he was different. Another word was gone, another moment of eye contact was lost. He began to cry in a way that was untranslatable. The wails were not meant as messages to be decoded; they were terrified expressions of being beyond expression itself.

A 21-year-old falls into a coma from which he’ll never emerge. His mother, desperate to grant his wish of becoming a father, has his sperm preserved. Two years later, after a fruitless search for other alternatives, she finds a willing doctor and tries one last option: carrying her son’s child herself.

Military recruiters reveal just how corrupted—and sometimes deadly—their job has become.

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.

The unlikely people who’ve turned to selling weed in the recession.

A young couple’s story.

A doctor reveals widespread organ harvesting of prisoners in China.

Walter Isaacson’s book is long, dull, often flat-footed, and humorless. It hammers on one nail, incessantly: that Steve Jobs was an awful man, but awful in the service of products people really liked (and eventually bought lots of) and so in the end his awfulness was probably OK.