“Morning and night the hordes of clerks and stenographers and business men who fill the offices of down-town New York have poured across Newspaper Row and City Hall Park with scarcely a glance at the labor progressing underfoot that is going to bring them so many minutes nearer their work in the morning, and at night so many minutes nearer their play.”

What IARPA's project calls for is the deployment of spy resources against an entire language. Where you or I might parse a sentence, this project wants to parse, say, all the pages in Farsi on the Internet looking for hidden levers into the consciousness of a people.

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.”

A few miles north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sausalito, is Richardson Bay, a saltwater estuary where roughly one hundred people live out of sight from the world. Known as anchor-outs, they make their homes a quarter mile from the shore, on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels, doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.

Pete Dexter, profiled.

"I'm sick and tired of the story," says Dexter, though he knows it is a signature moment of his trajectory from newsman to writing some of the most original and important novels in American literature, including the National Book Award–winning Paris Trout (1988), a riveting tale of an unrepentant racist who brutally murders a 14-year-old black girl in a small Georgia town in the late 1940s. Settling deep into a dark-green leather chair near a patio window that offers a commanding view of ferries chugging across the cold blue waters, Dexter begins: "It was not a good column. I was trying to write something I didn't feel." Dexter is referring to the column that almost got him killed.

“She taught me the tricks of trimming. She taught me to smile when my back ached. She taught me some Bengali words. Sab bhalo. It is all okay.”

Gaile Owens was a churchgoing mother of two boys in suburban Memphis. Now she’s the first woman sentenced to die in Tennessee in nearly 200 years. The jury never heard her whole story; this is it.

The creators of This is Spinal Tap, the most influential mockumentary ever made, have been paid almost nothing. Now they are suing for $400 million.

“Word choice is hard here. Should we say “raped” automatically if a grown man has sex with a teenager? Does it matter at all if the 15-year-old, now much older, describes their encounter as one of the best nights of her life? What is our word for a ‘yes’ given on a plane that’s almost vertically unequal? Does contemporary morality dictate that we trust a young woman when she says she consented freely, or believe that she couldn’t have, no matter what she says?”

While searching for the person who grifted me in Chicago, I discovered just how easy it is for users of the short-term rental platform to get exploited.

After the success of her novel Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen spent years trying to prove a man’s innocence. Now she’s “absolutely broke” and “seriously ill,” and her next book is “years past deadline.”

The author comments on the medium of the graduation cliché while still advancing it:

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

“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 how search and advertising became indistinguishable, the finer points of not being evil, and why privacy is by nature immeasurable. How Google made us the product:

“Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics,” wrote Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired. “It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising—it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.”

America’s fetishization of reproductive risk is driving mothers mad.

In 1979, a Pulitzer was given to “an unnamed photographer of United Press International” who documented a mass execution in Iran.

His name is Jahangir Razmi – and, nearly three decades later, he wants the credit.

A German officer is facing trial on terrorism charges. At a volatile time for Western democracy, his story mirrors the story of Germany itself.

Ah yes, you should also know that most of your colleagues are some of the biggest neurotics in the country, so you might as well get used right now to the way they're gonna be writing you five and ten page single spaced inflammatory letters reviling you for knocking some group that they have proved is the next Stones.

The Radiolab host on why young journalists should stop waiting for their turn and embrace the idea of horizontal loyalty:

Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

There is a little-known network of 11 federal prisons in America called Criminal Alien Requirement facilities. They exclusively house men who lack U.S. citizenship and have been convicted of crimes. They are all run privately. And over the last 18 years, they have allowed scores of inmates to die from diseases that could have been treated.

Joshua Williams was 18 when he was arrested in 2014 for stealing a bag of chips and lighting a QuikTrip trash can on fire in the aftermath of a protest sparked by the death of Antonio Martin near Ferguson, MO. He is still in prison.