In this previously-unpublished Fitzgerald story, a saleswoman wants a cigarette, and perhaps encounters something more profound.

"Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road."

A profile of The Wachowskis.

Memories of a college courtship.

The movies of Clint Eastwood.

A profile of Scooter Braun.

The rock critic’s lasting impact.

The uncomfortable, and increasingly vital, relationship between Barack Obama and billionaire donors.

The story of John Laroche, which led to Orleans’ The Orchid Thief, and tangentially, the film Adaptation.

The life’s work of Cosmo editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown.

On the O.J. Simpson verdict and the Million Man March.

How Paul Ryan remade the Republican Party in his own image.

What the health care industry can learn from how The Cheesecake Factory does business.

On distance running and the art of exhaustion.

The history of a relationship between a son and his mostly-absent father.

"He lay down. His spine pressed into the soil a notch at a time, undid him. Upside down was a land of female legs. He was fond of these new bell-shaped skirts, wide enough to crawl under and be kept safe, and wished he had waited to marry, or married differently. He thought, What if I stayed here? Let the sun swallow me, and the orange dazzle under my eyelids become not just the thing I see but the thing that I am, and let the one daisy with the bent stem, and the rose smell and the girl upside down on the pub bench eating an upside-down ploughman's with her upside-down friend be the whole of the law and the girth of the world."

On the scene of the darkest games in Olympics history.

Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.

A profile of Bruce Springsteen.

A profile of 6’8”, 430-pound Brian Shaw.

A personal reflection on bird-watching and relationships.

The Constitution and its worshippers.

Growing up with Charlie Brown.

A profile of Chief Justice John Roberts.

With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world.

Crime, drugs, and politics in Guadalajara.

Remembering George Plimpton’s old-fashioned style.

Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the last—a figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. No, my father’s voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were not—and his voice simply reflected this.

The bizarre story of the disappearance of “downtown legend” John Lurie after a former friend resolved to take his life.