“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

just three months, we have seen Charlie and Tessy through a lifetime of crises — temporary sobriety, meth binges, two stints in jail, three moves, one eviction, several religious, end-of-the-world texts on our phones, a dozen different phones and phone numbers (meth addicts go through “Obama Phones” like packs of cigarettes), and a stay in a psychiatric hospital. Every day brings some kind of cruel surprise, some hardship that would pummel me, but is just business as usual for them.

If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.

The Facebook COO on her generation’s failures and the continuing gender gap in American business and politics.

Today, we turn to you. You are the promise for a more equal world. You are our hope. I truly believe that only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality.

He has worked for Apple, Google, AOL, the Rainbow Room. He hangs out with Steve Case, Gordon Ramsey, Tim Armstrong. He's a world-class surfer, a AAA baseball legend, the founder of a seminal punk band. He's one of the more persistent and obsessive grifters to ply the streets of New York City—not to mention online dating sites—in recent decades.

Putin v. Khodorkovsky:

Almost a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the owner of the Yukos Oil Company and Russia’s richest man, completely miscalculated the consequences of standing up to Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president. Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested, completely miscalculating the consequences of putting him in prison. During his eight years in confinement, Khodorkovsky has become Russia’s most trusted public figure and Putin’s biggest political liability. As long as Putin rules Russia and Khodorkovsky continues to act like Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky will remain in prison—and Putin will remain terrified of him.

Remembering George Plimpton’s old-fashioned style.

Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the last—a figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. No, my father’s voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were not—and his voice simply reflected this.

“They have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left – from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism – as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties – the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates.”

After oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world. Then they began to be murdered off mysteriously. In 1924 the nascent FBI sent a team of undercover agents, including a Native American, to the Osage reservation.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

A visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships.

Olinka and Drazen are artists, and after some time passed, they did what artists often do: they put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival. It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul, showing the concept to the world. Everywhere they went, from Bloomington to Belgrade, people packed the halls and delivered their own relics of extinguished love: “The Silver Watch” with the pin pulled out at the moment he first said, “I love you.” The wood-handled “Ex Axe” that a woman used to chop her cheating lover’s furniture into tiny bits. Trinkets that had meaning to only two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience that seemed to recognize the same heartache all too well.

“Think about that: Kim has so thoroughly monetized the very act of living that the money she earns from being filmed going about her life constitutes a relatively small sum compared with the one she generates from allowing people to see pictures and cartoon drawings of the life she has already filmed. She has figured out how to spin the mundanity of being herself—something billions of people do every day for free—into a more lucrative business than being the most famous rapper in the world.”

'He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting for $20,000 a month. Police and medics were called to the scene, but within 30 minutes, Perepilichny was pronounced dead. Police told the press the death was “unexplained.” A 44-year-old man of average build and above-average wealth had simply fallen down and died in the leafy suburb he’d recently begun calling home.'

On the Birthright Israel program, which sends young American Jews on a tour of Israel free of charge, thanks to massive funding from both the Israeli government and philanthropists like the conservative casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

A new era is dawning for Birthright. What began as an identity booster has become an ideology machine, pumping out not only Jewish baby-makers but defenders of Israel. Or that’s the hope.

“In this scene, set at a government dacha, they are joined by their American counterparts at the State Department for a daylong picnic that grows increasingly informal, involving drinks, flirtation, a guitar jam and (spoiler) contact between two spies. At times in my new job, I feel like a spy myself, and one with a shaky cover. I don’t have a good answer for how I got here.”

In 2009, Condé Nast allowed this story to appear in print but refused to publish it online or distribute it in Russia for fear of retribution. The story, which details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings that allowed Vladimir Putin’s rapid ascension to power, is reprinted on Longform courtesy of the author.

The sewer hunters, or “toshers,” of 19th century London.

Knowing where to find the most valuable pieces of detritus was vital, and most toshers worked in gangs of three or four, led by a veteran who was frequently somewhere between 60 and 80 years old. These men knew the secret locations of the cracks that lay submerged beneath the surface of the sewer-waters, and it was there that cash frequently lodged.

A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

She calls claiming to be Amy Pascal, Kathleen Kennedy, or some other powerful woman in entertainment. She knows personal details about her mark as well as the woman she is impersonating.

She offers work, then sends them—photographers, make-up artists, soldiers—around the world to bilk them out of modest amounts of cash.

Watching Florida government on the state and local level is like watching two parents bring an alcoholic home after he got kicked out of rehab and deciding that the best course of action is leaving him with $5,000 in an apartment up the street from a dive bar and then going to Cancun for the week. It was on the calendar already, there wasn’t any choice, he looked very healthy at the time!

In the latest revelation from Edward Snowden, the U.S. government is shown to collect and retain massive amounts of data on nearly 900,000 people with the most minimal of connections to official NSA targets. The collected information tells our “stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.”