Double Lives On The Down Low
Ostensibly straight black men who have sex with other men.
Ostensibly straight black men who have sex with other men.
Benoit Denizet-Lewis New York Times Magazine Aug 2003 30min Permalink
Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman.
Matt Taibbi New York Press Apr 2005 10min Permalink
An obituary for Richard Nixon.
Hunter S. Thompson Rolling Stone Jun 1994 10min Permalink
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.
Leon Wieseltier The New Republic May 2002 15min Permalink
The landmark article that changed the way communities were policed:
This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one"- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order—is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.
George L. Kelling, James Q. Wilson The Atlantic Mar 1982 25min Permalink
A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of group homes for the retarded in Washington, D.C.
Katherine Boo Washington Post Mar 1999 40min Permalink
A profile.
Gay Talese Esquire Apr 1966 Permalink
The most dreadful men to live with are those who thus alternate between angel and devil.
Not long before she died, Anne Isabella Noel Byron gave a wide-ranging interview to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most notoriously, she accused her husband, Lord Byron, of carrying on a “secret adulterous intrigue” with his half-sister.
The Atlantic lost 15,000 subscribers in the months following publication of this article.
Harriet Beecher Stowe The Atlantic Sep 1869 15min Permalink
Tom Wicker was without a notebook on November 22, 1963. Instead, reported Gay Talese, he “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas.”
Here’s the 3,700-word masterpiece he filed.
Tom Wicker New York Times Nov 1963 15min Permalink
Joseph Mitchell immerses himself in the Fulton Fish Market.
Joseph Mitchell New Yorker Jun 1952 45min Permalink
A prescient take on what the US invasion of Iraq would mean for both countries.
James Fallows The Atlantic Nov 2002 40min Permalink
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.
Ernest Hemingway The New Republic Jan 1938 Permalink
An essay on Orson Welles’ (and/or Herman Mankiewicz’s) 1941 film Citizen Kane.
Pauline Kael New Yorker Feb 1971 3h5min Permalink
On Jews:
The Jews are happy in the United States. There are now two hundred congregations of them here, half of whom have arrived within the last twelve years. They are good citizens, firmly attached to those liberal principles to which they owe their deliverance from degrading and oppressive laws, and are rising in the esteem of the people among whom they dwell. Their attachment to the system of universal education is hereditary; it dates back three thousand years; and though their religious feelings are wounded by the opening exercises of many public schools, they would not for that reason destroy them.
James Parton The Atlantic Oct 1870 50min Permalink
A blow-by-blow account of Howard Unruh’s slow, deadly walk through Camden, New Jersey – filed an hour before deadline.
An ex-spook takes on the Warren Commission.
William W. Turner Ramparts Jan 1968 45min Permalink
If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a somber literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime -- if you should be so young and fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Esquire Apr 1936 25min Permalink
A profile of a serial sex offender:
This is a story about how hard it is to be good—or, rather, how hard it is to be good once you’ve been bad; how hard it is to be fixed once you’ve been broken; how hard it is to be straight once you’ve been bent. It is about a scary man who is trying very hard not to be scary anymore and yet who still manages to scare not only the people who have good reason to be afraid of him but even occasionally himself. It is about sex, and how little we know about its mysteries; about the human heart, and how futilely we have responded—with silence, with therapy, with the law and even with the sacred Constitution—to its dark challenge. It is about what happens when we, as a society, no longer trust our futile responses and admit that we have no idea what to do with a guy like Mitchell Gaff.
A profile of the Hell’s Angels following “front-page reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula.”
Hunter S. Thompson The Nation May 1965 15min Permalink
Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked. It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.
William Bradford Huie Look Jan 1956 15min Permalink
Part one of W.T. Snead’s Victorian-era investigation into child prostitution.
William T. Snead The Pall Mall Gazette Jul 1885 45min Permalink
A newly minted, 34-year-old White House budget director gets a little too candid with a reporter profiling him during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. Among Stockman’s many admissions: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”
William Greider The Atlantic Dec 1981 50min Permalink
The article that spawned a school of thought; an elegy for the age of the megahit and a primer for the niche-based future.
Chris Anderson Wired Oct 2004 20min Permalink
Fifty-four days after his group’s Everest climb turned tragic, Krakauer first told the story of what had gone wrong.
Jon Krakauer Outside Sep 1996 15min Permalink
Inside the bleak world of Joe Francis, the man behind the “Girls Gone Wild” franchise.
Claire Hoffman The Los Angeles Times Aug 2006 25min Permalink