For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious attitude, but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from the forces of culture that would commodify it.

Rule #5: “Be unflappable.”

In that first New York City apartment, not once but twice, cops came to bust brothels operating on our floor. When they attempted to batter down our door instead of our neighbors', we opened up, pointed them in the right direction, and explained cheerily, "Oh, we're not hookers!" To our great satisfaction, the mystery of why that man was always washing sheets in the shared laundry room had finally been solved.

People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.

A biography of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios.

On July 2017, a visitor to the Museum of Capitalism contributed a watch (from here on referred to as 'our watch') to the museum’s artifact drive. In his form, he noted that Folsom & Co., a supposedly San Francisco-based company, used Instagram to offer the watch 'free,' but with $7 shipping.

Five hundred feet below ground with Ohio coal miners.

The making of the “five-thousand-page, five-volume book, known formally as the Dictionary of American Regional English and colloquially just as DARE”:

What joking names do you have for an alarm clock? For a toothpick? For a container for kitchen scraps? Or an indoor toilet? Or women’s underwear? When a woman divides her hair into three strands and twists them together, you say she is_____her hair? What words do you have to describe people’s legs if they’re noticeably bent, or uneven, or not right? What do you call the mark on the skin where somebody has sucked it hard and brought blood to the surface?

Finally, the crowd broke for lunch, with those who paid $1,000 availing themselves of private workouts. The highest tier lunched with Paltrow and select panelists. The proles were relegated to wandering around the warehouse and converted parking lot for two hours, getting solicited by dream interpreters or standing in endless lines for free blowouts or manicures — services promptly halted once the panels resumed, no matter that some had spent well over an hour in line.

On a group of teenage believers raised in settlements on the West Bank:

They say it takes one generation to found a new language. These girls are a new language, believing that they belong to the land on which they were born, and sponsored by the government they despise, which pays for their roads and electricity.

On January 18, 1990, Mayor Marion Barry was caught smoking crack at D.C.’s Vista Hotel. The author was one of the first reporters on the scene. He interviewed guests, staff, anyone he could find. Then he got a room, called his regular strawbery, and got high himself.

Before he died, Sun Myung Moon, cult father to massive Unification Church (known better as the Moonies), sent 14 Japanese “national messiahs” deep into the Paraguayan jungle to build an utopian “ideal city.” Thirteen years later, the author catches a trading boat down river in search of their hidden town.

After acting erratically and trying to skip out on a dinner bill, she was detained briefly in Malibu before being released in the middle of the night. Twenty-four years old and in an unfamiliar area, she had no car, no phone, and no wallet. A year later, her body was found in a nearby canyon. On the search for answers.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, on crying in movie theaters, “attention whores” and David Foster Wallace.

During the last decade, more than 1,500 Americans died after accidentally taking too much of a drug renowned for its safety: acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

Confessions of a yellow journalist:

Let me say that I did very little faking, although there was no special prejudice against it, so long as the fake wasn't libelous.

On comics and journalism:

Now, when you draw, you can always capture that moment. You can always have that exact, precise moment when someone’s got the club raised, when someone’s going down. I realize now there’s a lot of power in that.

In the first seven months of 2011, 94,000 people were sued for illegally downloading porn. Not one case has been decided by a jury. On the industry’s new strategy to make downloaders pay.

He arrived in Bolivia in November 1966, disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. After desertions, drownings, and difficulty contacting their support group in La Paz, his small troop was surrounded the following October. The inside story of how they were found and destroyed.

America’s pregnancy leave policies – or lack thereof – continue to bear no relationship to the reality of being pregnant. It’s time for something to give.

The murder of a 34-year-old by a wig-wearing figure traces back to meth, an FBI sting and a former municipal judge who once sent a live copperhead snake to a foe through the U.S. mail.

For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people on earth to practice cannibalism.

Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on the New York City sex industry was supposed to be a cornerstone of his legacy. Then smut shops and strip clubs read the ordinance’s fine print.

With Washington State debating a bill that would force Christian pregnancy centers to be more forthright about their anti-abortion agenda, a pair of reporters hear firsthand what the centers are telling young women.

A minute-by-minute account of what it takes to run a restaurant.