Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, the Klan and Her Train
Bessie Smith toured in her own railway carriage, loved women and men and died in a 1937 crash. Plus the family's Klan story and Janis Joplin's gravestone.
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How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough
Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviews “Kobuk the Destroyer, and Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering,” by Alex Davies.
Why the Bronze Age collapsed
Historians like to blame drought, famine and invaders. But this can’t explain why the empires never came back.
A Place Among the Fiddlers - Longreads
In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
Humanity is under assault by malevolent "antimemes"—ide…
He Changed the World of Organ Transplants. Would He Die Waiting for His Own?
A New York transplant surgeon’s experience waiting for a heart transplant laid bare the challenges of a system he had spent decades trying to fix.
Casablanca: How an Unproduced Play Marched Into Movie History | TheCollector
Of all of Hollywood’s beloved classic films, the Warner Bros. studio’s heart-rending wartime hit Casablanca might rank first in the hearts and minds of fans.
‘I don’t chase the dollar. I never did’: the astonishing hidden life of Mr T
He grew up in the ghetto, became a global superstar – then gave it all up. Why did he step away from the spotlight?
A College Caught in the Middle of America’s Football Obsession
Jesse Dougherty on the football culture at Oberlin College and how it reflects the sport’s fanfare in America.
Bari Weiss Blew Up 60 Minutes. Now She Has to Fix it.
Inside her battles with the staff and her attempts to overhaul the show.
A bungled bomb plot in Poland exposed a spy – but whose spy was he?
The long read: When exiled Russian opposition campaigner Igor Rogov was accused of working for the Kremlin, his friends were shocked. Could this young activist have really been an undercover agent?
Here’s the Scoop: A Reading List on Ice Cream - Longreads
Seven stories that celebrate the surprising influence of a humble dessert.
A Firefighter Family, 25 Years After 9/11
Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in an elite FDNY rescue unit, taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to Ground Zero to search for him.
How to survive in a Louisiana swamp - UnHerd
The Grate Cheese Robbery - Longreads
How organized crimes fell in love with cheese.
What Would It Mean to See a New Color?
Olo can be described as the “greenest green,” though it can never be captured by a camera, Rivka Galchen writes. But its development tells us a lot about our color vision.
I Flew in the Douglas DC-3, a WWII Workhorse of Aviation, Over the Amazon
The Douglas DC-3 was mass-produced during World War II. Today, one of the few still remaining transports passengers in Colombia’s jungle.
The NBA superstar Carmelo Anthony on life after basketball | Psyche Portraits
For 19 years, the NBA superstar Carmelo Anthony mastered the version of himself the world demanded. Retired from basketball, he confronts a harder question: who is he now?
Real-life thriller: A mysterious hijacking, an unsolved murder, and $100 million in the balance.
A mysterious assault. An unsolved murder. And a ship that hasn’t given up all its secrets.
The Witness – Texas Monthly
For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.
Trigger: The Life of Willie Nelson's Guitar – Texas Monthly
Most guitars don’t have names. This one has a voice and a personality, and bears a striking resemblance to his owner.
Life, in Dog Years – Texas Monthly
My father always pampered his pets. So when he fell ill and moved in with us, it was no surprise that his corgi came to rule our home. What I didn’t expect was for Trilby to care for me after Dad was gone.
Rope-a-Dope
Are the Enhanced Games an existential threat to fairness or a cure for death? Zach Helfand reports.
The next morning, I caught a training session at the pool. It was difficult to discern the outward effects of enhancement on the athletes. The swimmers looked like swimmers—sinewy and long, with huge hands and feet. An exception was James Magnussen, an Australian who’d been the first person to sign…
Ariel Delgado Dixon on NYC's weed underground
Author of the new novel Sourland remembers a kingpin.
Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad
The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.
How a Gang of Thieves Pulled Off a Multimillion-Dollar Data Center Heist
The world’s most valuable assets are stored on rows of servers in giant, anonymous buildings. And they can be stolen.
Replacement Windows to the Soul - Nautilus
For millennia, artisans have been trying to capture the mystique of the human eye
The man who invented American popular music turns 200
Stephen Foster wrote some of the most enduring American songs, invented the role of songwriter, and served as a cautionary tale for his successors.
America’s Last Bookie Goes Down
Tim Pughsley built a sports-betting website that moved billions, then the I.R.S. got involved. In the age of FanDuel and DraftKings, where is the line between legal and illegal gambling? Keith O’Brien writes.
Meet the Dog People of the Big Thicket
Along the bottomlands of the Neches River, descendants of this legendary clan still hunt, fish, and live off the land they fought so hard to preserve.
Ken Griffin’s Billions and Billions
The hedge-fund magnate is an unabashed big spender—from pièds-a-terre to politics. Gary Sernovitz profiles the financial titan behind the Citadel hedge fund.
Seven Books You’ll Never Outgrow
Some stories are worth revisiting at every stage of life.
You Can Run - The Atavist Magazine
The fugitive childhood of a cocaine smuggler's daughters.
Black Gold and Grey Markets
Adventures in energy trading
‘The devil’s child’: the rise and fall of the only female yakuza
The long read: Mako Nishimura fought her way into the Japanese underworld, but drug addiction and the slow demise of organised crime gangs almost destroyed her
Engineering the disposable diaper - Works in Progress Magazine
Mirror Life’s Doomsday Potential
Scientists working on synthetic “mirror life” have come to realize that, if created, it could pose an existential threat to life on Earth.
Mirror life would be the genesis of an organism that does not imitate nature but contradicts it. It would have a molecular structure opposite to that of all existing life on Earth. It would be something completely new under the sun, and its creation would commence the beginning of a second tree of…
The Grandmothers Who Become Mothers Again
Casey Cep on the book “Mawmaw,” by the photographer Anthony Wilson, about West Virginia women who, after a tragedy, care for their children’s children.
Emerich Juettner: The One Dollar Counterfeiter
In fiction as well as in real life, counterfeiters have always been portrayed as master forgers and artists who reproduced banknotes with as...
The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared
The long read: In December 1982, South African Rodney Wilkinson walked four bombs into Koeberg power station – the crown jewel of the apartheid state – pulled the pins and then left on his bicycle. How did he do it?
The Diver Who Witnessed His Own Death
The Diver Who Witnessed His Own Death: The most dangerous job on Earth is at the bottom of the sea.
The Macabre Case of the Man in the Mask
And the shadowy world of Andrew Crispo.
The True Story of Donn Fendler, the 12-Year-Old Who Survived Alone in the Wilderness | TheCollector
In 1939, 12-year-old Donn Fendler disappeared while hiking Maine’s most challenging mountain. His incredible story of survival has amazed generations.
A Kingdom from Dust
A story of power, drought, migrant labor, and an insatiable drive to expand.
Bears Discover Fire - Lightspeed Magazine
I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since…
They’re Made Out of Meat - TERRY BISSON of the UNIVERSE
Copyright, Terry Bisson, 1991 Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter…
Saving the Girl with Dementia
Saving the Girl with Dementia: It takes a family to drive research for a rare disease forward.
The Death of a Superman - Believer Magazine
The last night of Superman’s life came on a balmy Friday in Los Angeles, California. It should have been just like any other night for Christopher Dennis. Blue-eyed, standing six foot five, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Christopher Reeve, for years Dennis had been a…
Project Mario - Colossus
The inside story of how DeepMind’s experiments in AI safety governance transformed Demis Hassabis from an idealist into a realist
The Age of the Amplifier
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.