On Politico’s brand of insider journalism.

The backstory of “The Duke in His Domain,” Truman Capote’s 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando.

The allure of conclusion-shaping and a wunderkind’s fall.

I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it.

The former editor of the New York Observer, profiled.

“Has anybody in Westchester County ever called the New York Times his or her ‘friend’? I realize that the rest of America, in its post-Katrina fatigue, is pretty tired of hearing New Orleanians, the city’s acolytes and defenders, always carrying on about how it’s the most unique city in America, but, the fact is, it is. Get over it.

And so, too, is its newspaper.”

On the craft of reporting poverty.

On “soldiers for credibility” and the tug of war over truth.

Inside the business of manufacturing online product reviews.

How “grand metaphors” drive politics.

On New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

The rock critic’s lasting impact.

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

Fact-checking David Brooks.

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

The frenzied few days before the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

A history of The New Yorker and its editors, from founder Harold Ross through Tina Brown.

An oral history of WFAN.

A 7,000-word anatomy of the chaotic 9 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its health care ruling.

An ode to the MSNBC anchor.

A profile from Cooper’s early days an an anchor.

The taming of the political reporter.

A self-conscious celebrity profile.

On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.

As Playboy magazine moves to Los Angeles, the writer considers its place in the Midwest.

No other general interest magazine tried to reach readers in the wide swathe of land between New York and California. “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there. If you wanted it to be hip, edgy, go toe-to-toe with GQ, you were making a mistake,” said Chris Napolitano, a former executive editor who began at Playboy in 1988.