American Hippopotamus
A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.
History
Lincoln’s Great Depression
How Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong struggle with clinical depression was a key to his presidency.
How Chicago House Got Its Groove Back
A look at Chicago’s DJ culture in the ’90s.
One day in 1997, Sneak promised his friend and fellow Chicago DJ Derrick Carter a new 12-inch for Carter's label Classic, then spent hours fruitlessly laboring over a basic, bustling four-four beat. Finally, Sneak gave in and smoked the J he'd had stashed for later in the day. When he came back inside, he carelessly dropped the needle onto a Teddy Pendergrass LP, heard the word "Well . . . ," and realized, "That's the sample, right there." He threaded Pendergrass's 20-year-old disco hit "You Can't Hide From Yourself" through a low-pass filter to give it the effect of going in and out of aural focus, creating one of the definitive Chicago house singles.
The Hidden Queer History Behind "A League of Their Own"
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League did everything it could to keep lesbians off the diamond. Seventy-five years later, its gay stars are finally opening up.
Up and Then Down
The lives of elevators.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Edie Bakes Cakes"
A troubled TV chef meets a mysterious creature.
The Dognapping of the Century
When a ring of thieves steals a poet’s beloved dog, one of the world’s most famous women must break her long domestic oppression and discover herself in the process.
Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question.
Was she the reason he was alive today?
This Maine Fish House is an Icon. But of What, Exactly?
The story behind an Instagram sensation is the story of a changing coastal Maine.
The Symbolic Seashell
On the meaning of an ancient practice: collecting seashells.
The Sum of Life: Zora Neale Hurston
Retracing the writer’s life nearly 60 years after her death.
The Falling Man
In the days after 9/11, a photo of an unknown man falling from the South Tower appeared in publications across the globe. This is the story of that photograph, and of the search to find the man pictured in it.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Lost Girls"
Young sisters, an old newspaper, and notions of time.
Best Article Arts History Music
Mystic Nights
The making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville.
“Oh My God—We Hit a Little Girl”
The true story of M Company: from Fort Dix to Vietnam in 50 days.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Confessions of the Lovestruck"
The rise and fall of a band in public and behind closed doors.
The Birth of a New American Aristocracy
How the 9.9 percent became “the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.”
A Lynching’s Long Shadow
A new historical inquiry into the murder of Elwood Higginbotham offers a chance to confront the past.
Mother Earth Mother Board
A 42,000-word, 3-continent spanning “hacker tourist” account of the laying of the (then) longest wire on earth.
The White Darkness
How a solitary trek across Antarctica became a singular test of character.
Fiction: "Do You Think You'll Come Home?"
Illness, family, and the weight of history.
How the Sandwich Consumed Britain
The story of a national obsession.
The Man Who Forgot He Was a Rap Legend
T La Rock was one of the pioneers of hip-hop. But after an attack put him in a nursing home, he had to fight to recover his identity, starting with the fact that he’d ever been a rapper at all.
1491
The Western Hemisphere before Columbus.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Worlds from the Word's End"
A letter outlines the history and eventual decline of human communications.
