Longform

Breaking the news of the Kennedy assassination, an oral history:

Wicker: [In the press room] we received an account from Julian Reed, a staff assistant, of Mrs. John Connally’s recollection of the shooting…. The doctors had hardly left before Hawks came in and told us Mr. Johnson would be sworn in immediately at the airport. We dashed for the press buses, still parked outside. Many a campaign had taught me something about press buses and I ran a little harder, got there first, and went to the wide rear seat. That is the best place on a bus to open up a typewriter and get some work done.

On Michael Lewis and the global financial crisis.

Previously: The Michael Lewis World Tour of Economic Collapse

A profile of Ozzy Osbourne.

The Occupy Wall Street origin story.

Because women and girls don’t always kick ass, and neither should our heroines:

Bella Swan, by contrast, is a much more honest though cringe-inducing representation of adolescence. She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. She’s clumsy, obtuse, and aggravating in her helplessness. She is also entirely internal, almost alienatingly so. One of my favorite passages from the novel New Moon is when Stephenie Meyer inserts a series of blank pages to stand in for the months that pass while Bella mourns — out of any reasonable proportion — Edward’s desertion. Bella, kind of wonderfully, takes her time.

The Starbucks-fueled saga of how Jim Romenesko, beloved journalism blogger, took an early retirement.

A look at Andy Warhol’s enduring popularity and power in the art market.

Warhol’s art was not supposed to be a matter of emotion, introspection or spiritual quest; it was to be an image, pure and simple. “During the 1960s,” he wrote knowingly in 1975, “I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.”

A profile of Seif Qaddafi.

On the Brooklyn nature walk built alongside a sewage treatment plant.

On playing chess and waiting to get arrested.

A son chronicles his father’s death:

My father's mortician was a careless barber. Stepping up to the open casket, I realized too much had been taken off the beard. The sides were trimmed tidy, the bottom cut flat across. It was a disconcerting sight, because in his last years, especially, my father had worn his beard wild, equal parts loony chemist and liquor store Santa. The mortician ought to have known this, I thought, because he knew the man in life. My father — himself the grandson of a funeral home director — would drop by Davey-Linklater in Kincardine, Ontario, now and then for a friendly chat. How's business? Steady as she goes? Death was his favourite joke.

Houston detectives investigate a series of brutal assaults on prostitutes in the Acres Homes section of the city. They thought they were after one man; it turns out they were wrong.

The case for why a cup of joe is about to become a luxury item.

An investigation into the disappearance of a 24-year-old British cruise ship activity director from the Disney Wonder opens the strange and insular world of cruise employees, who vanish mysteriously at alarming rates.

Nine months after the AOL merger, here’s a progress report.

Central Park wasn’t always so bucolic.

Gangs of toughs—teenagers and the macho middle-aged, usually drunk, occasionally including a couple of off-duty cops—roam the Ramble at night, engaging in an old American pastime: fag bashing. You don't have to be gay. You don't have to be exposing yourself. You don't have to be doing anything except walking through the tangled darkness to be abused, shoved, threatened at knifepoint, kicked, and beaten.

On Al Vernacchio, the best sex ed teacher in America.

I’ve read stories from people who say they always knew they were attracted to the same sex, or that they figured it out at a young age. I’m not one of them.

Chantix is a pill that decreases the pleasurable effects of cigarettes. It also causes hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and waking nightmares:

A week into my Chantix usage, I started to feel as if the city landscape had imperceptibly shifted around me. Mundane details began to strike me as having deep, hidden significance. The neon arch above McDonald’s: The lights blinked on and off in some sort of pattern, and I needed to crack the code.

How American higher education became a summer camp doubling as a debt factory.

On the death of a high school basketball star in New York City.