How Tom Wolfe Became Tom Wolfe
The celebrated writer Tom Wolfe died on Monday. Michael Lewis’s 2015 profile went deep into his biography and his writing to tell his story.
Al Franken, That Photo, and Trusting the Women
This eloquent piece looks at the sexual harassment allegations against Senator Al Franken and uses them as a springboard to examine humanity’s long history of identifying trustworthiness as a male trait and duplicity as its female counterpart – via Aristotle, Galen, Jezebel, Cassandra, Hamlet and others.
The Disposition of Drones
A piece examining how military drones actually work and interact with both their operators and so-called “customers” (soldiers on the ground).
The Last of the Iron Lungs
A profile of three of the last polio sufferers in the US using an iron lung. The piece examines what life is like spent in one of these contraptions, used in a medical context for nearly 100 years.
Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
A searching piece about Amazon and monopoly, published in a newspaper owned by Amazon’s CEO. If you have the time, it’s also worth dipping into the elegantly wrought 28,000 word ‘note’ in The Yale Law Journal that inspired the piece.
Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook – and the World
A piece examining the series of challenges Facebook has faced as it struggles to manage the intended and unintended consequences of its huge scale and the reach it has into many parts of its users’ lives.
The Heart and the Fist
The journalist that wrote this story covering a political scandal surrounding the right wing, ex-Navy Seal, Governor of Missouri has an unusual angle – she went to the University of Oxford with his wife, and they were friends.
The Danger of President Pence
A piece positing that those who hope for the impeachment of President Trump might be missing some of the consequences.
The Spy Who Came Home
A story about Patrick Skinner, currently a local cop in Savannah, Georgia, but formerly a CIA case officer directly engaged in post-9/11 operations. The piece jumps between his two careers and relates how he is applying lessons from the CIA to community policing.
In Conversation: Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones is fantastically indiscreet in this interview, covering everything from his relationship with the Trumps, to Michael Jackson’s alleged theft of songs and The Beatles’ lack of musical talent.