I am gay. I am Mormon. I am married to a woman. I am happy every single day. My life is filled with joy. I have a wonderful sex life. And I’ve been married for ten years, and plan to be married for decades more to come to the woman of my dreams.
A former sex worker interviews a longtime John on how it feels to pay for it.
An interview with John Waters.
Real life is seeing and art is looking. If you’re successful, it’s a magic trick: you take one thing, and you put it in here, and it changes in one second, and then you can never look at that thing again the same way. That is what art is to me.
On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.
Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the radical activist “beyond the leading edge” of the same-sex marriage fight.
John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed.
A decade-long Internet hoax unravels.
A trip to Disneyland in the mid-1960s.
Previously posted on Longform.org on January 25th, 2012.
The Horace Mann School’s secret history of sexual abuse.
The history of American whaling.
A profile of fashion designer Nudie Cohn, who made clothing for Elvis, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, and others.
Uncovered letters reveal ties between the literary magazine and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.
A profile of Fleshlight inventor Steve Shubin.
On conspiracy theories in sports, from the ‘85 NBA draft lottery to Michael Phelps’ gold medal performance in the 100-meter butterfly.
The author recounts playing herself – best-selling author Sloane Crosley – on an episode of “Gossip Girl.”
How Sherry Hunt soaked the banking giant.
On the rise of DIY genetic engineering.
“I turned to see Eva padding around the room, naked, dipping a small plastic wand into the bottle of bubble soap she’d bought at the market… Sometime in the far future, when I was lying on my deathbed, I said, this was the moment I wanted to remember.”
On the relationship between travel and photography.
The cold, forgotten realities of “conventional warfare.”
Growing up on B-movies.
A history of the fowl.
As Playboy magazine moves to Los Angeles, the writer considers its place in the Midwest.
No other general interest magazine tried to reach readers in the wide swathe of land between New York and California. “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there. If you wanted it to be hip, edgy, go toe-to-toe with GQ, you were making a mistake,” said Chris Napolitano, a former executive editor who began at Playboy in 1988.
The political fight over a new football stadium in Minnesota.
The anatomy of a sex abuse scandal at a Christian school in Oklahoma.
The author on his mother’s deteriorating health and the “price of longevity.”
Between 2003 and 2011, there were 50 “invisible” fatalities at cell towers, “a death rate roughly 10 times that of construction.”
