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.
North America’s Lost Medieval City
On the trail of Cahokia, a city in what is today Illinois – at its peak around the year 1000, it was bigger than Paris, but it was later totally abandoned.
Populism as a Backlash Against Globalisation – Historical Perspectives
The historian Niall Ferguson finds better parallels for the current political climate in American populism of the late 1800s rather than the more frequently referenced European fascism of the 1930s and 40s.
McMaster and Commander
A look behind the scenes at how H.R McMaster adapted from the military into his role of National Security Adviser, and the reality of dealing with a boss who takes in little of what you say. His solution was straightforward – “If Mattis was a babysitter, then McMaster was a waiter, presenting the Commander-in-Chief with a menu, and letting him order.” What this didn’t necessarily allow for was any questioning of what was going on the menu.
Dirty John
The strange and grim story of an online romance on an over-50s dating site that quickly progressed to marriage, and then went to much darker places as the story of ‘Filthy’ John Meehan unravelled. The deep-dive piece is accompanied by a six part podcast.