“Neither of my parents was exactly who I thought they were.”

What the author learned about himself from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth.

The making, and marketing, of a 9-year-old meme machine.

The psychology behind our limitations of reason.

A dark journey Into the world of a man gone wild.

A grandmother’s tale of the night her first love had to leave town.

A profile of the Korean director.

The origins of a misplaced panic.

On Kara Walker.

Inside the National Quarantine Center, there Is no fear of Coronavirus.

Three nights with 311 in the waning moments of free American life.

On the death of a major league pitcher and its aftermath.

A trip to the “Olympics of hairdressing” with Team USA.

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.

The author interviews England in prison:

By now, people all over the world have heard of Lynndie England. She's the "Small-Town Girl Who Became an All-American Monster," as one Australian newspaper headline described her, or "the girl with a leash," as Mick Jagger calls her in the song "Dangerous Beauty." Yet England remains a mystery. Is she a torturer? A pawn? Another victim of the Iraq war? While the world weighed in, England said very little.

On the importance of skateboarding.

With three shows currently in production, Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee and American Horror Story, is one of the few show runners whose name commands an audience.

Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Texas headquarters of Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, so he started stealing — and got a little carried away.

The murder of an Iranian band in Brooklyn by one of their own.

Previously: Nancy Jo Sales on the Longform Podcast.

Walter Isaacson’s book is long, dull, often flat-footed, and humorless. It hammers on one nail, incessantly: that Steve Jobs was an awful man, but awful in the service of products people really liked (and eventually bought lots of) and so in the end his awfulness was probably OK.

On who will bear the burden of the financial crisis facing cities across America. “Will it be articulated in terms of bond defaults or larger kindergarten classes—or no kindergarten classes at all?”

A visit with John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing, which “changed the way at least two generations responded to art,” just before his death.

Two men died of meth overdoses at the home of a West Hollywood political donor. Dark conspiracy theories abounded— but the truth is even darker

Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon.