A profile of Ludwig Minelli, the head of the Swiss assisted suicide organization Dignitas.

On the rise of the modern city – and the rise of missing persons.

What IARPA's project calls for is the deployment of spy resources against an entire language. Where you or I might parse a sentence, this project wants to parse, say, all the pages in Farsi on the Internet looking for hidden levers into the consciousness of a people.

A field trip to the video gamey world of the modern trader.

During her brief tenure as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin was a genuinely effective, bipartisan legislator. What went wrong?

Confessions of a yellow journalist:

Let me say that I did very little faking, although there was no special prejudice against it, so long as the fake wasn't libelous.

A profile of Larry Garrison, the man who “gets paid to bring tabloid stories to TV news programs.”

An investigation into rising crime rates in small American cities. Is a lauded antipoverty program to blame?

Inside the world of air-traffic controllers.

As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.

A profile of the “lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-talk-show-host-turned-journalist.”

On the battle over solar farms in the Mojave desert. An excerpt from Madrigal’s new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.

I love combing through The Atlantic’s archives. There’s almost no better way of grasping the strangeness of the past than to flip through a general interest magazine from 1960. Here, we find Fred Hapgood grappling with what human intelligence meant in the light of new machines that could do something like thinking. Intelligence was being explored in a new way: by finding out what was duplicable about how our minds work. Hapgood's conclusion was that if you could automate a task, it would lose value to humans. What tremendous luck! Humans value that which only humans can do, he argued, regardless of the difficulty of the task. And that because computers were so good at sequential logic problems, we'd eventually end up only respecting emotional understanding, which remained (and remains) beyond the reach of AI.

-A. Madrigal

Reposted after it was pulled by The Atlantic:
How the little known $50/bottle champagne Antique Gold became the $300/bottle Armand de Brignac that Jay-Z “happened upon in a wine shop” and then featured in a video.

Did A.Q. Khan sell nuclear secrets on the black market? The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West—an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role.

The unlikely ascent of A.Q. Khan, the scientist who gave Pakistan the Bomb, and his suspicious fall from grace.

The long, happy, surprising life of 77-year old Donald Gary Triplett, the first person ever diagnosed with autism.

The perilous routes through which information—video footage, secret documents, radio broadcasts—flow in and out of North Korea through its porous borders with China.

Is it time to end the mourning period for old media?

How a journalism professor named Dan Sinker became the most entertaining part of the Chicago mayoral race.

A manifesto from one of the first professional bloggers on a new ‘golden age of journalism.’

A look at what it takes to protect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he’s in New York City.

A newly minted, 34-year-old White House budget director gets a little too candid with a reporter profiling him during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. Among Stockman’s many admissions: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

What happened when the founder of North Face and Esprit bought a chunk of Chile the size of a small state, intending to live with a select group inside it and turn it case study for ecological preservation. It turned out, however, that Chileans didn’t really like that idea.