An oral history.

The autonomous car of the future is here:

I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.

"I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don't think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts."

On February 25, 1969, Bob Kerrey led a raid into a Vietnamese peasant hamlet during which at least 13 unarmed women and children were killed.

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

How is Canada’s “post-AIDS” generation coping? Not that well.

[I]n some ways we are still hopelessly lost. A generation of men who could have been our mentors was decimated. The only thing we learned from observing them was to ruthlessly identify “AIDS face,” that skeletal appearance the early HIV drugs wrought on patients by wasting away their bodily tissues. But those faces grow more rare each day.

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

How a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

The hunt for a secretive network of British men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

The former editor of the New York Observer, profiled.

When the best three months of your life are “called three of the uglier months in the recent history of the National Football League.”

Michael Quinn took on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and lost.

The afterlife of 486 frames of Kodachrome II 8mm film shot by Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder.

A father’s life, one year after the death of his three daughters in a fire.

Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, cocaine, and the making of The Blues Brothers.

The legendary artist has radically upended his distinctive style of portraiture—and his entire life. Why?

A 16-year-old journalist goes on tour with a band on top. The article that inspired Almost Famous.

Why utopias are best understood as fiction games, and how they quickly become dystopias when realized.

On the producer Timbaland, then best known for collaborations with Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, and Ginuwine.

A profile of Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian doctor who became Bin Laden’s #2 and has now taken over Al-Qaeda.