“For so long, we’ve thought keeping our heads down and being invisible in America might help us gain acceptance — but the recent wave of racist violence has shattered that myth.”

“You have to ask for food. You have to ask to go use the bathroom. … [Kelly] is a master at mind control. … He is a puppet master.”

Mr. Jobs's pursuit for aesthetic beauty sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers beautiful. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.

“The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor.”

Manson at 79: in poor health and walking with a cane, obsessed with Vincent Bugliosi, willing to talk at length with a reporter for the first time in years, and visited every weekend by a 25-year-old woman he calls Star.

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.

When Elon Musk went to Russia to buy some rockets.

On the chaotic letters of journalist and Dr. Strangelove screenwriter Terry Southern.

For years, a tactical police unit in Mount Vernon, New York, reigned with impunity—protecting drug dealers, planting evidence, brutalizing citizens. Then one of its own started covertly documenting the abuse.

On the BBC radio addresses of E.M. Forster: “For one thing, he won’t call what he is doing literary criticism, or even reviewing. His are ‘recommendations’ only. Each episode ends with Forster diligently reading out the titles of the books he has dealt with, along with their exact price in pounds and shillings.”

The author on his reverence for water.

The journey of a river from source to mouth resembles our own journey from birth to death, an analogy oft remarked, and yet the beginnings and endings of rivers are as fictional as those we impose on stories. There are headwaters to headwaters and no river ever really ends.

From 2009 to 2014, police in Florida shot 827 people. Many of these incidents were avoidable and unnecessary.

In late 1960s London, famed psychoanalyst R.D. Laing created a radical asylum—one with no doctors, no locks, and no limits.

Former Washington Post opinion page editor Greenfield on not being overwhelmed by the past in the search for a “better truth”:

History helps guard against moral smugness too, or it should, anyway. For you are obliged, if you are honest, to acknowledge at least some reflection or resonance of the fallen ones in your own nature. Such humility is a conspicuously missing aspect of our contemporary culture, however. What might be a becoming spell of moral introspection, tends instead to become an orgy of bashing and blaming. I observe that now, as always in this country, when people speak of a terrible, all embracing decline in ethical standards, they are invariably speaking of the decline in their next door neighbor's standards, not their own.

How the Mast Brothers fooled people into paying $10 a bar for mediocre chocolate, and how a food blogger was able to figure it out.

With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.

A Hollywood screenwriter finds out his identity’s been stolen when a hooker calls–from his private office–demanding to be paid for the sex they didn’t just have.

The history of a Japanese archipelago and its inhabitants, through rebellions and famine, a 20th century exodus for prostitution work across Asia, and finally depopulation and isolation.

An estimated 70,000 transgender youth lack secure housing. This is what life on the streets is like for six of them.

In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.

A profile of Uruguay President José Mujica, a former revolutionary who’s been shot six times, was imprisoned for 14 years and, since taking office, has shunned the presidential mansion in favor of a small farm while legalizing gay marriage, abortion and marijuana.

“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.”

The rise and fall of Synanon, an addiction-recovery cult in California, and its charismatic leader, a one-time homeless wino named Chuck Dederich who taught his followers to berate each other for therapy.