A profile of Jobs. The themes: immortality, relinquishing control, and how being adopted affected his choices for Apple. The lede: “One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.”

Two decades later, a traffic stop on a country road is still teaching police officers about deadly force – and the cost of hesitation. Part 1 of “The Trigger and the Choice,” a 3-part series.

To understand the rise of Donald Trump is to understand his mentor, Roy Cohn — and the New York City establishment that aided and abetted him.

“The key differentiator of Super-Aggregators is that they have three-sided markets: users, content providers (which may include users!), and advertisers. Both content providers and advertisers want the user’s attention, and the latter are willing to pay for it.”

When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there.

A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:

The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.

“Editing is crucial because in my experience anything you try to make - what YOU want is for the story to be AMAZING. But what the story wants to be is MEDIOCRE OR WORSE. And the entire process of making the story is convincing the story to not be what it wants to be, which is BAD.”

How a woman born of wealth and privilege tries to bomb the establishment from which she came and ultimately dies in the process.

This Pulitzer-winning series is reprinted online in full and for the first time by Longform.

According to the movie version, they died side by side, guns blazing, in the crosshairs of half a Bolivian regiment. It’s a great Hollywood ending that happens to be true, mostly: they left America… then died in Bolivia. What Hollywood didn’t know is that Butch and Sundance escaped.

Why the world is becoming less free.

The cover story from the June 2011 print edition of The New Republic, available on the web specially for readers of Longform.org.

Chains, knives, fists, and, of course, those crude and unreliable homemade affairs called zip guns were the staples in the more vicious gang wars in the 1940s and 1950s. Today there is scarcely a gang in the Bronx that cannot muster a factory-made piece for every member—at the very least, a .22-caliber pistol, but quite often heavier stuff: .32s, .38s, and .45s, shotguns, rifles, and—I have seen them myself—even machine guns, grenades, and gelignite, an explosive. One gang, the Royal Javelins, has acquired some walkie-talkie radios.

Interviews with modern travelling salesmen. The article inspired Kirn’s novel Up in the Air.

What makes this a truly military culture, besides its overwhelming maleness, its air of emotional deprivation and the lousy rations, is its obsession with rank and hierarchy. Like jungle gorillas, business travelers always know where they stand versus the rest of the group. In this parallel universe of upgrade vouchers and priority-boarding privileges, everyone has a number and a position, and who gets that open aisle seat in first class means even more on the road then who earns what.

Tom Catena is the only surgeon for thousands of square miles in Southern Sudan. His hospital, and his life, are constantly under threat. There is no end to the carnage he must treat. He refuses to leave.

On the Red Sox’s historic implosion:

Drinking beer in the Sox clubhouse is permissible. So is ordering take-out chicken and biscuits. Playing video games on one of the clubhouse’s flat-screen televisions is OK, too. But for the Sox pitching trio to do all three during games, rather than show solidarity with their teammates in the dugout, violated an unwritten rule that players support each other, especially in times of crisis.

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine?

On the London riot on 2011, which “tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out.”

On the road with Billy Bob Thornton and his band The Boxmasters. Twenty years after Sling Blade all he wants to do is direct but “but none of those Hollywood assclowns will give him the keys anymore.”

An important house in Florida history is for sale, its future uncertain. Some want the historic house preserved, while the racism that fueled the Rosewood riots remains.

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a 
gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

About 100 miles from Galveston, Flower Garden Banks is home to some of the healthiest coral communities in the world. Some unlikely allies came together to help expand protections, but will it be enough?

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.