The Egg Men
How breakfast got served at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas.
Best Articles
Home for the Holidays
Surviving a trip to see the family for Thanksgiving.
“How I envy people who enjoy the company of their parents without the aid of pharmaceuticals.”
Reprinted from Home for the Holidays and Other Calamities.
The Man Who Taught America To Play
Henry Orenstein survived three years in concentration camps before creating Transformers and poker cameras.
The Promise That Tested My Parents Until the End
A couple, a caregiver, and a promise.
The World in Its Extreme
A 17,000-word exploration of the Sahara Desert, the hottest place on Earth.
Home Body
No house is private. It may be purchased, and thus legally private property, but it doesn’t stand alone. Through its extending wires, pipes, inputs and outputs, the house (with few off-grid exceptions) is tied up in the cyborg systems of the city and the supply chains and logistical inputs that extend around the globe.
If He Hollers Let Him Go
Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his show.
I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.
The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.
The Unpolitical Animal
How political science understands voters.
Two Soldiers
Specialists Solomon Bangayan and Marc Seiden fought together in Bravo Company’s 3rd Platoon in Iraq. Both were killed. Here’s how they made it home.
Eat Butterflies With Me?
On Vladimir Nabokov.
In the Streets with Antifa
Trump is vowing to designate the movement as a terrorist organization. But its supporters believe that they are protecting their communities—and that confronting fascists with violence can be justified.
The Incredible Story of the Collar Bomb Heist
In 2003, a man robbed a bank with a bomb around his neck. It exploded shortly thereafter, taking his life and leaving authorities to try to figure out who had put it there.
My Mustache, My Self
“A quarantine facial-hair experiment led me to a deep consideration of my Blackness.”
He’d Waited Decades to Argue His Innocence. She Was a Judge Who Believed in Second Chances. Nobody Knew She Suffered from Alzheimer’s.
Nelson Cruz’s family was so sure Judge ShawnDya Simpson would free him, they brought a change of clothes to his hearing. Then everything took an unexpected turn.
The Last Patrol
In 2019, President Trump pardoned Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who was serving a 20-year sentence for ordering the murder of two Afghan civilians.
To Lorance’s defenders, the act was long overdue. To members of his platoon, it was a gross miscarriage of justice.
The President's Taxes
“Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.”
Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult
How eBay’s Global Security and Resiliency team ran a rogue campaign to terrorize a blogger couple with insects, pornography and pizza.
The Taste Makers
Where does Strawberry-Kiwi Snapple come from? Givaudan is part of a tiny, secretive industry that produces new flavors.
Going Postal
A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive.
How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda
Immigrant struggles in America forged a bond that became even tighter after my mother’s A.L.S. diagnosis. Then, as COVID-19 threatened, Chinese nationalists began calling us traitors to our country.
Here Be Monsters
Three teenage boys decide to set sail after a night of drinking. They go missing for 51 days.
Can Greek Tragedy Get Us Through the Pandemic?
A theatre company has spent years bringing catharsis to the traumatized. In the coronavirus era, that’s all of us.
On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic
On losing your Beloved in 2020.
The Eco–Yogi Slumlords of Brooklyn
How did a couple who built an empire of yoga studios and homes with “living walls” end up as pandemic villains?
