“Let me state, in all frankness, that I have never harbored personal doubts or a lack of confidence. That may be good or it may be bad. But if you see your actions as objectively correct, then not having doubts is good. I must admit that pride may have influenced my attitudes from time to time. But once I came to a conclusion as to what was right, I had great personal confidence in those ideas.”

The director of Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours on his aversion to America, the advantages of small budgets, and the challenges of directing the opening ceremony for the London Olympics.

"And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music".

A profile of the California governor.

The state of the American cockfight.

Investigating the world of “belly torture.”

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past

Meditations on the myth of the voiceless.

A profile of fashion designer Roberto Cavalli.

It’s 11 a.m. Cavalli has just risen from his wolf-fur-covered bed and said good morning to Boy, his tiger-striped Bengal cat, and Gino, his miniature monkey. At a breakfast table covered with a cloth of one of his swirling bird patterns, on which are placed four packs of cigarettes and two cigars, Cavalli sinks down on a leopard-print cushion. While he eats applesauce and drinks orange juice from Cavalli tableware, he is surrounded by his four parrots and three beautiful publicists. “Give me some bad questions,” he tells me, lighting a cigar. “I will try to be nice.”

Profiles of the true believers.

The rebirth of the World Trade Center.

On the importance of the human microbiome.

The story of a face transplant.

The scientific pursuit of the afterlife.

Mini-Currys and the future of basketball.

Firsthand accounts of the largest and most ambitious internment drive of a minority group since Nazi Germany, emerging from a region of totalitarian surveillance and control.

“What I had going for me was teen rage, contempt impervious to offers of compromise; the power of the mask capable of turning ice to marshmallow, and all the time in the world, all the ability to sustain it without surrendering.”

What it was like to edit The New Republic at its most contentious.

One of the little tweaks I made the first time I got the job was to change the slogan on the table of contents from “A Journal of Politics and the Arts” back to the original: “A Weekly Journal of Opinion.” All the fine reporting notwithstanding, what The New Republic did best, had always done best, was opinion. Its politics were polemical, its art was the art of argument.

A day in the economic life of the Nairobi’s Kibera, the largest shanty-town in Africa.

The inside story of how the U.S. missed the 2018 World Cup.

The evolution of cheating in chess.

The tormenting of Wen Ho Lee.

The allure of invisibility.