“If I had to pick one sentence I’ve heard more than any other in the last six years of conversation about economics, it would be ‘Why aren’t people more angry?’ The Brexit vote showed that plenty of them are. But perhaps it expressed that other feeling, the one of bewilderment, just as much. ‘Take back control’ is a cynical but extremely astute pitch to an electorate in that state of mind.”

After a botched bank robbery in 1990, Sture Bergwall, aka Thomas Quick, confessed to a string of brutal crimes. He admitted to stabbings, stranglings, incest and cannibalism. He was convicted of eight murders in all, and after the final trial he went silent for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, Bergwall came forward again—there was one more secret he had to tell.

Inside the world of online dating:

If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony.

Tom Wolfe on the development of ”New Journalism,” an unconventional reporting style which he helped to pioneer.

I had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I was doing things no one had ever done before in journalism. I used to try to imagine the feeling readers must have had upon finding all this carrying on and cutting up in a Sunday supplement. I liked that idea. I had no sense of being a part of any normal journalistic or literary environment.

An interview with the ‘media ecologist’ on corporations, feudalism, the Dark Ages, the birth of currency, debt, how PR was invented, and why—

"...Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home."

Joan Didion versus the boys on the bus:

American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is one reason why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported.

On the 1988 presidential election and the boys on the bus.

"Look, people's lives are people's lives, and some of them can't cope or be as organized as some of us might like. But it's only in the area of sex that we get involved in the ethics of promoting risk-taking, the idea that we should withhold information or devices because we don't want people to need them. Would you make the same argument about cholesterol drugs? Saying, If we give people a drug that will reduce cholesterol, they won't be as likely to exercise and eat properly like they really should?"

An uncertain future for the retailer.

"Sears was so powerful and so successful at one time that they could build the tallest building in the world that they did not need," says James Schrager, a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "The Sears Tower stands as a monument to how quickly fortunes can change in retailing, and as a very graphic example of what can go wrong if you don't 'watch the store' every minute of every day."

In the weeks after Davis shot the six cops, faked out the costly, nationwide manhunt for 17 days, and held a major portion of the NYPD to a standoff in the Twin Parks Houses near Fordham Road, huge black-and-white mug shot-like photos of a starry-eyed, baby-faced killer adorned the front pages of the tabloids under headlines like “They Won’t Take Me Alive” and the local news anchors excitedly invoked his name at the top of every show.

“Biafra lost its freedom, of course, and I was in the middle of it as all its fronts were collapsing. I flew in from Gabon on the night of January 3, with bags of corn, beans, and powdered milk, aboard a blacked out DC6 chartered by Caritas, the Roman Catholic relief organization. I flew out six nights later on an empty DC4 chartered by the French Red Cross. It was the last plane to leave Biafra that was not fired upon.”

On November 12, 2012, after Belizean police announced that they were seeking him for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor, John McAfee began a well-publicized stint on the lam. Six months earlier, the writer had begun an in-depth investigation into McAfee's life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.

Listen to Joshua Davis disucsses this article on the Longform Podcast.

A profile of Chris Evans, star of the upcoming Captain America:

At this point, which was a…number of drinks in, it was easy to forget that it really was an interview, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't cross my mind that something might happen (and that we'd go to the Oscars and get married and have babies forever until we died?). But there was always the question of how much of it was truly Chris Evans, and whom I should pretend to be in response.

On animal cremation and burial in New York:

Riding around Manhattan on a delivery run with a car full of pet cremains, it's hard not to look at the world differently. The omnipresence of pets becomes glaringly obvious, and their inevitable fate is never far from the mind. It's easy to imagine the whippet being jaywalked across Eighth Avenue getting hit by a car. The cocker spaniel on 23rd Street? A bucket of cocker bones in the making.

Billy Joe Frazier was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Laurel Bay, S.C., the youngest of 12 children. His father, Rubin, and his mother, Dolly, worked in the fields, and the youngster known as Billy Boy dropped out of school at 13. He dreamed of becoming a boxing champion, throwing his first punches at burlap sacks he stuffed with moss and leaves, pretending to be Joe Louis or Ezzard Charles or Archie Moore.

For the past 16 months, he had worked as a mole, posing as a militant jihadist in the Islamic State while passing critical information to a secret branch of Iraq’s national intelligence agency. His record was stunning: He had foiled 30 planned vehicle-bomb attacks and 18 suicide bombers, according to Abu Ali al-Basri, the agency’s director. Captain Sudani also gave the agency a direct line to some of the Islamic State’s senior commanders in Mosul.

But there’s one way that NFTs are profoundly different from the last generation of online disrupters. In terms of ownership, they actually move in the opposite direction of projects like Napster, BitTorrent and the software communities that destabilized the entertainment industry. Those were about reproducing data and sharing it for free, or eventually, a subscription fee. NFTs are about taking what should be a fully shareable image and sticking a SOLD sign on it.

How America is trying to fight terrorism in Africa without doing any of the actual fighting.

On the Becket Fund, a little-known firm that has become the leading force in the fight for corporations seeking a religious exemption from covering employees’ birth control.

CeCe McDonald, a homeless trans teen in Minneapolis, was charged with murder for defending herself. Then she became a folk hero.

Spun-off from Time Warner and saddled with $1.3 billion in debt as a parting gift, the once-mighty Time Inc needs to reinvent itself. Fast.

In 1981, Mauritania became the last country on Earth to abolish slavery. The law had little effect; at least 140,000 people are still enslaved today. Their best hope for freedom is an abolitoinist named Biram Dah Abeid.