Touching Death: The Turbulent Life of One of America’s Last Snake-Handling Preachers
A look at the work of snake-handling preachers in Kentucky.
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump
A message board allowing users to post anonymously has played a significant role in the recent history of internet culture (think – the birthplace of the meme), the development of new extreme right movements sometimes called the ‘alt-right’, and the series of events that put Trump in the White House.
How Rudy Giuliani Turned Into Trump’s Clown
Jeffrey Toobin’s profile of Rudy Giuliani is full of political insight, but also contains a healthy dose of revealing anecdotes – such as those about life at Giuliani’s favourite cigar club, complete with Alec Baldwin’s description of “Republican Manhattan”.
David Foster Wallace on John McCain: “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub”
David Foster Wallace spent a week with the late Senator John McCain during his 2000 Republican presidential primary battle against George W. Bush for this perceptive and nuanced profile.
Don’t Eat Before Reading This
The 1999 piece that helped launch Anthony Bourdain’s career as a writer and broadcaster. In it, he offered readers the inside track on the restaurant industry, warts and all. It was apparently sent in to the magazine as an unsolicited manuscript.
Bob Woodward;s new book reveals a “nervous breakdown” of Trump’s presidency
This piece relays a series of extraordinary vignettes from Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, portraying the dysfunction of the Trump White House. The article also contains a recording of Woodward’s telephone conversation with Trump, which took place after the manuscript was completed.
The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People
A look at one of the toughest jobs in the business – content moderation at Facebook. It is area where the company has been forced to ramp up their team due to a string of crises and bad publicity. The piece does well at providing a sense of the scale, difficulty and sheer oddness of the task – which, for example, now involves the company having a specific policy on things like what variety of photos of anuses photoshopped onto celebrities should be acceptable.
IÕm Not Black, IÕm Kanye
Ta-Nehisi Coates on two ÔgodsÕ_Ñ_Michael Jackson and Kanye West, his own fortune Òto come of age in the last days of mysteryÓ before the social feed, fame, and America. As one reader puts it, the writing in this piece is Òbottled lightning.Ó http://bit.ly/atlantic-kanye
Steve Bannon, Unrepentant
The piece that may have precipitated Steve Bannon’s dismissal from Donald Trump’s White House – a Scaramucci-style candid call to a journalist – on the record.