Banned in Russia and cut by Condé Nast from the GQ website, this story (presented in full) details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings, blamed on Chechens, that allowed Putin to rapidly ascend to power.

In 1980, a bankrupt gambler came up with a plan to get his money back. He built an incredibly complex bomb, one that was impossible to defuse and that only he knew how to move, and snuck it into a Lake Tahoe casino with an extortion note demanding $3 million. Part of the plan worked. Part of it did not.

Inside an IRL cult built on Facebook memes and semen-drinking.

A prostitution and sex trafficking ring operated on the outskirts of a U.S. Navy base in Bahrain and may have involved 15% of the sailors stationed there.

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.

“Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.”

A non-fiction comic on the evolution of military and civilian style amid the ‘forever war.’

Deputy Treasury Secretary Justin Muzinich has an increasingly prominent role. He still has ties to his family’s investment firm, which is a major beneficiary of the Treasury’s bailout actions.

Open source materials suggest that, for now, the apocalyptic, anti-government politics of the “Boogaloo Bois” are not monolithically racist/neo-Nazi. As we have observed, some members rail against police shootings of African Americans, and praise black nationalist self defense groups.

But the materials also demonstrate that however irony-drenched it may appear to be, this is a movement actively preparing for armed confrontation with law enforcement, and anyone else who would restrict their expansive understanding of the right to bear arms. In a divided, destabilized post-coronavirus landscape, they could well contribute to widespread violence in the streets of American cities.

“Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

Black patients were losing limbs at triple the rate of others. The doctor put up billboards in the Mississippi Delta. Amputation Prevention Institute, they read. He could save their limbs, if it wasn’t too late.

The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.

“We know we down in this shithole together.”

A profile of Marlon Brando, 33, holed up in a hotel suite in Kyoto where he was filming Sayonara.

In American baseball, flipping your bat is frowned upon. In South Korea, it’s an art.

On the then-new phenomenon of dead downtowns.

The strange life of a 16-year-old model.

A young dealer goes on the lam after selling multiple masterpieces to several buyers simultaneously.

The story of one of the great final acts in sports history.

A Covid diary: This is what I saw as the pandemic engulfed our hospitals.

The life and work of a Manhattan psychoanalyst.

Sometimes the Study Area seemed like a tumor that had burst on the side of capitalism. Other times it seemed like something ancient and sensible: people building dwellings, then improving them.

A dispatch from a caretaker.

A speech on the value of being alone with your thoughts, delivered to the plebe class at West Point.