On the personal genetic sequencing company 23andMe and why their long time term strategy is collecting spit, not cash.

On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.

Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

Critics call it “the radio of pimps and vagina-sellers.” But a popular new call-in show is helping a generation of Afghans navigate a battlefield full of strife and confusion and fear: modern love.

China is securing sub-Saharan Africa’s natural resources at a staggering rate. With the buying spree comes contracts, workers, and of course, politics. (Part 1 of a 6 part series, rest here)

When spouses get upset because their husband or wife wants to be frozen upon death, it’s not because they find the practice sacrilegious. It’s because their partner is consciously considering a future without them.

“Life has a soundtrack. And certain music is a soundtrack to a certain type of identity or feeling. 50 Cent, the Game, and those kinds of guys—they made us feel like our lives were worth nothing, basically.”

An Ironman consists of a 2.4-mile swim, then a 112-mile bike ride and then a marathon. The Quintuple Anvil Triathlon is five Ironmans in a row.

Pitcairn Island is impossibly remote, populated by descendants of a ship of British mutineers. Their population would not be revealed to the outside world until allegations of a culture of child molestation and rape that led back generations.

I don’t want my part to get skipped over, but I still don’t know how to write directly about what went down between me and M. All I can do is worry a detail like an R&B singer worries a line.

On lucha libre’s exóticos, “wrestlers who dress in drag and kiss their rivals, never quite revealing whether the joke is on their opponents, themselves or conservative Mexican society at large.”

“There is only one given: On the afternoon of August 16, a 22-year-old from Australia named Christopher Lane, who had come to America to go to college and play baseball, went out running and, without warning or knowing why, was shot to death in Duncan.”

Seven years after being fired from The Replacements, their founding guitarist is an thirty-three-year-old unemployed line cook living amongst memories in Minneapolis. He would be dead within two years.

“I probably am mellowing. I’m happy about that. I was a pretty angry young man, but if I were angry now, it’d be like, What the fuck is my problem? I’ve got a really terrific life. It’s so rare to be an artist in my position.”

They were raised Hasidic in Brooklyn. Now Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz live a decadent, booze-filled life in Puerto Rico. They are in their early 30s and rich enough to retire, while Wall Street is busy adopting the shady loan scheme they pioneered.

A profile of Arnold Schwarzenegger written during his first year in office as Governor of California:

"You know, the thing I love about Mexican women is how furry their pussies are."

A profile of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the Malibu-dwelling, “fantastically corrupt” dictator-in-waiting of Equatorial Guinea. Teodorin, as his friends call him, is considered by U.S. intelligence to be “an unstable, reckless idiot.”

Thomas Hargrove is building software to identify trends in unsolved murders that can detect serial killers that police never knew existed.

“They think of us as pests, so they are trying to drive us out of our homes, for what is the Republican drive for our self-deportation if not a plan of fumigation?”

TheFacebook, as it was then called, had just reached 1.5 million users:

In the end, Zuckerberg says, quarrels over money rarely come up because money is not their priority. “We’re in a really interesting place because if you look at the assets we have, we’re fucking rich,” Zuckerberg adds. “But if you look at like the cash and the amount of money we have to live with, we’re dirt poor. All the stuff we own is tied up in random assets” like servers and the company itself. “Living like we do now, it’s, like, not that big of a deal for us. We’re not like, Aw man, I wish I had a million dollars now. Because, like, we kind of like living like college students and being dirty. It’s fun."

“There are critics who see their job as to be on the side of the artist, or in a state of imaginative sympathy or alliance with the artist. I think it's important for a critic to be populist in the sense that we’re on the side of the public. I think one of the reasons is, frankly, capitalism. Whether you’re talking about restaurants or you’re talking about movies, you’re talking about large-scale commercial enterprises that are trying to sell themselves and market themselves and publicize themselves. A critic is, in a way, offering consumer advice.”

On Jonny Greenwood:

Greenwood is an anomaly: a musician who made his name with a rock band and who is now embraced by the modern-music establishment as an actual, serious composer. The night before the Alvernia session, he was onstage in an aircraft-hangar-size room at a steel plant in Krakow, performing the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” for an audience that included Reich himself, as part of a weeklong new-music festival, Sacrum Profanum. (Reich is a fan; he praises Greenwood’s decision to have the string section play with guitar picks on “Popcorn Superhet” as “the first new approach to pizzicato since Bartok.”) He wasn’t the only performer at Sacrum Profanum with pop-music credentials — the bill also included the techno provocateur Aphex Twin and Adrian Utley, from the trip-hop band Portishead. But he was the only guy from a superfamous rock band whose singer has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.

“The case of Lisl Auman, who first wrote me from prison three years ago, is so rotten and wrong and shameful that I feel dirty just for knowing about it, and so should you.”

When a 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur pulled over to answer a text message he was carjacked by Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. This is what happened that night and how he escaped.