An interview with the novelist.

The magician who spent his life debunking spiritualists and exposing con men.

How Warren Hinckle and Ramparts magazine helped revive muckraking journalism and launch the New Left.

How Andrew Anglin went from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll.

Charlie Santore sees Los Angeles from the inside, by breaking into safes whose owners can no longer unlock them.

What one funny-looking fish taught us about evolution, the internet, and the monsters we create.

Thomas Joshua Cooper risks his life to document the world’s remotest places.

An insider watches Kink.com prepare to leave the hundred-year-old armory it occupies in San Francisco.

On the fraught relationship between Bolivia’s Evo Morales and the indigenous activists who support him.

How the state’s “restitution program” forces poor people to work off small debts.

As vaccines roll out, the U.S. will face a choice about what to learn and what to forget.

How the writer Jesse Armstrong keeps the billionaire Roy family trapped in its gilded cage.

On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.

A little after 9 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1990, the owner of a steel-products company pulled up to her office in Vinegar Hill, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spotted a black garbage bag sitting on the sidewalk out front. She parked her car and went to move the bag when she noticed it leaking blood. The woman called 911. Within the hour, Ken Whelan, a homicide detective from the 84th Precinct, peered into the bag. It was full of human body parts.

Four Galician sisters take on the macho percebeira culture to harvest one of the world’s most expensive delicacies, the gooseneck barnacle, from the frigid sea.

Adapted from Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain’s Food Culture.

Unpacking the empty promises of the minimalism craze.

The editors of N+1 recap the revolution that is/was the internet with pit-stops to survey the Bolshevik Revolution, the NYT’s messy relationship with tech, and the value of an ad.

How what was once one of the most popular websites on Earth—with ambitions to redefine music, dating, and pop culture—became a graveyard of terrible design and failed corporate initiatives:

In retrospect, DeWolfe says, the imperative to monetize the site stunted its evolution: "When we did the Google deal, we basically doubled the ads on our site," making it more cluttered. The size, quality, and placement of ads became another source of tension with News Corp., according to DeWolfe and another executive. "Remember the rotten teeth ad?" DeWolfe says. "And the weight-loss ads that would show a stomach bulging over a pair of pants?"

An interview on craft.

The world’s richest prisoner interviewed from the Siberian prison colony he calls home.

Immigrant farmers are flocking to the poultry industry – only to become 21st-century sharecroppers for companies like Tyson.

A review/interview/profile:

Let's settle on the bald facts: Eminem has secured his place in the rap pantheon.

Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two.

Who gets out alive when disaster strikes? The people who can afford it.

“It’s odd, the older I get, the more I remember.”