Blockbusters in the age of “corporate irony.”

A profile of Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Published originally in GQ Russia.

The former editor of the New York Observer, profiled.

On New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.

Inside the puppet trial of the decade.

The story of Donald Smaltz, an independent prosecutor run amok.

On Mitt Romney’s top strategist—a steroid-dabbling, screenwriting bon vivant.

A personal history of “America’s most misunderstood religion.”

On the enduring political influence and entrenched racism of the Greek system at the University of Alabama.

A profile of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister.

The inside story of the Affordable Care Act.

An investigation into Erin Brockovich and the lawsuits that made her famous.

Fact-checking David Sedaris.

All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.

A former first-string tackle considers the green zone as a war zone:

Just as football has evolved in accordance with the evolving business ethic of American society, so has it evolved in accordance with the changing strategic assumptions about war. The development (or rebirth) of the T-formation in football coincided almost exactly with the development of a new era of mobility and speed in warfare best exemplified in the Blitzkrieg tactics of the German armies in Europe in 1939-40. The T-formation soon overwhelmed the “Maginot Line” mentality of traditional football, based as it was on rigid lines and massive concentrations of defensive and offensive power.

A critical look at the contemporary art marketplace.

The trouble is that a business model has come to drive the entire art world, and like the corporate executive who regards the launch of each new product as a challenge to the success of the last one, because you must keep growing or you will die, the arts community finds itself in a state of permanent anxiety. There always has to be a new artist whom the media will embrace as enthusiastically as they embraced Warhol; there always has to be a show that will top the excitement generated by the last blockbuster at the Modern or the Met.

He was the world’s foremost collector of presidential memorabilia, an outsider with a pathological need to fit in. He was also a thief.

James Wood on Saul Bellow:

One realizes, with a shock, that Bellow has taught one how to see and how to hear, has opened the senses. Until this moment one had not really thought of the looseness of a lightbulb filament, one had not heard the saliva bubbling in the harmonica, one had not seen well enough the nose pitted with black pores, and the demolition ball’s slow, heavy selection of its victims. A dozen good writers–Updike, DeLillo, others–can render you the window of a fish shop, and do it very well; but it is Bellow’s genius to see the lobsters “crowded to the glass” and their “feelers bent” by that glass–to see the riot of life in the dead peace of things.

A charismatic entrepreneur, an ex-con turned devout Christian, and the politicians who championed them.

The story of a $36 billion Ponzi scheme in Minnesota.

THEY SAY YOU never hear the one that hits you. That's true of bullets, because, if you hear them, they are already past. But your correspondent heard the last shell that hit this hotel. He heard it start from the battery, then come with a whistling incommg roar like a subway train to crash against the cornice and shower the room with broken glass and plaster. And while the glass still tinkled down and you listened for the next one to start, you realized that now finally you were back in Madrid.

On the phenomenal, disturbing influence of Ayn Rand.

What makes Rick Perry run?

Notes from the campaign trail in Nevada with Ron Paul.

Part of Longform.org’s guide to the 2012 GOP field at Slate.

What are the foreign policy views of Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney?

No one argues before the Supreme Court more than Tommy Goldstein.