April 28, 2017 gluekit How a chicken farmer, a pair of princesses, and 27 imaginary spies helped the Allies win World War II. In the weeks leading up to D-day, Allied commanders had their best game faces on. “This operation is not being planned with any alternatives,” barked General Dwight D.…

On a typical sunny day at San Quentin State Prison, twelve miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, California, large flocks of geese settle in the prison yard. The prison is an oddly peaceful place, surrounded by a cluster of residential houses where mothers push toddlers in strollers…

As US audiences tire of big budget spectacle, Hollywood designs its blockbuster product for the ever-expanding Chinese market It matters that Superman is a white man, even though he’s not human but an alien from the planet Krypton. It matters that Batman, Spiderman, Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, and…

This article shares the first part of its title with the tagline for this iconic 1920s Soviet propaganda poster . Also considered were the taglines for this poster , issued during the space race, which reads “I am happy—this is my work joining the work of my republic,” and this one’s , “Glory to the…

The New York Times: A NYT reporter has been covering Ebola in West Africa for two months. Vigilance is essential: http://t.co/AA8yGCqagk

Boot up your computer. If you’re the owner of one of the more than two hundred million Macs sold, what’s the first thing you hear when you start or restart your machine? That sound tells you you’ve held down the power button long enough to get things going. And the fact that it’s there means you…

Adam Voorhes O n the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers. Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful…

U.S. Army / Flickr Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, the Taliban’s military leader for southern Afghanistan, sat stolidly, his great bulk sup­ported in an overstuffed chair to my left. It was October 2, 2001, and events had been hurtling forward since the terrorist attacks of September 11. President…

In Lahore, Pakistan, the city where I was born and where I once again live after two decades abroad, my experience of picking up my children from school has recently changed. As of this term, I can no longer enter my daughter’s kindergarten. I must show an ID card with her photograph at the…

Konstantin von Wedelstaedt/Wikimedia Commons I remember first hearing about the accident early in the morning after the airplane went down. It was October 31, 1999, Halloween morning. I was in my office when a fellow pilot, a former flying companion, phoned with the news: It was EgyptAir Flight 990,…

O. J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Timothy McVeigh—seeds of the present? Illustration by Concepción Studios; Clockwise from top: Michael Nelson / AFP / Getty (Simpson); Reuters / CORBIS (McVeigh); Barbara Laing / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty (Building); APTV / AP (Lewinsky) History is the…

Homes in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in the Coachella Valley. Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered a 25 percent statewide reduction in non-agricultural water use. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times By , Jack Healy and Nelson D. Schwartz LOS ANGELES — For more than a century, California has been the state…

A screen shot of a video released by ISIS showing militants destroying antiquities in the Mosul Museum in Iraq, February 2015 “We’re ridding the world of polytheism, and spreading monotheism across the planet,” an ISIS preacher recently said in a video recording. Behind him one could see the ISIS…

The convoy of army trucks, cranes, and flatbeds has been chugging its way under cover of darkness through the craggy mountains of eastern Afghanistan for hours. Now just a few miles from its destination, an outpost in the town of Chamkani, a stone’s throw from the border with Pakistan, the sun is…

Illustrations by Skip Sterling H e’d spent years wondering when the other shoe would drop. The revelation had taken him by surprise — the best possible thing that could have happened under the circumstances, his lawyer said — and yet the promise of it weighed too heavily for him to completely go…

As part of the stories of the year collection, this piece is being resurfaced along with others in the coming days as ESPN Digital and Print Media closes out the year. Check out the full list here. ON THE MORNING of Jan. 17, 2014, Madison Holleran awoke in her dorm room at the University of…

The tracks near East Meadow Drive in Palo Alto, where multiple high school students have gone to die. (1 of 7) "I am not OK, and I can speak for many of my friends at school—we are not OK. I want to feel comfortable at school. I want to enjoy what I’m learning. Right now, I’m doing none of those…

We’ve come up with the menacing term “troll” for someone who spreads hate and does other horrible things anonymously on the Internet. Internet trolls are unsettling not just because of the things they say but for the mystery they represent: what kind of person could be so vile? One afternoon this…

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki Walt Disney Pictures The nominations won’t be announced until Jan. 15, but it’s safe to say that the greatest filmmaker associated with the 2015 Academy Awards has already received his Oscar, delivered a modest but revealing acceptance speech and flown home to Japan and,…

Elissa Strauss | Longreads | May 2015 | 15 minutes (4,006 words) I first noticed “mama” while pregnant with my son in 2012. I was browsing on the internet—familiarizing myself the different types of mothers out there, trying to figure out what kind of mother I might become—when I noticed a number of…

Uncollected garbage burns in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during a period when New York felt close to complete collapse.Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images T ravellers arriving at New York City’s airports in June 1975 were greeted with possibly the strangest object ever handed out at…

Photo: Marvel Comics A reboot is a delicate thing. When a once-profitable franchise of characters becomes stale, outdated, or overly complex, there will always be voices calling for the slate to be wiped clean: to take the characters back to their basics, retell their origin stories, make them…

Freedom Detention Firefight Family Onward "I just wish for people to give me a chance" E DMONTON – Omar Khadr is standing in his bedroom looking out at the backyard. It is his second morning of freedom after nearly 13 years behind bars, and he's embarrassed because he doesn't know how to open the…

Dzhokhar, taken by the author in 2006. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not one of my students, but he was someone I would have happily snagged for my classroom. He was in the half of seventh and eighth grade that I didn’t teach and a friend of my advisees. He was soft spoken and polite, and I had a lot of…

It’s not too surprising that Marvel and Fox are engaged in a little “secret war” of their own, over the licensing of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. But as Fox presses forward with movies based on both properties, that war is slowly becoming public. Here’s a guide to how Marvel is trying to erase…

(Photo: Jesse Untracht Oakner) J ’accuse museums of bullshit! Of ­bogusly turning themselves into smash-hit consumer circuses, box-office sensations of voyeurism and hipster showbiz. This year, the institution-­critiquing art known as Relational Aesthetics—essentially audience-participation art,…

They Might Be Giants: John Flansburgh and John Linnell While other artists align themselves with streaming services, the 30-year vets employ kitschy, antiquated tech for song distribution It’s a little bit crazy to think that John Linnell and John Flansburgh have been making music as They Might Be…

Matt Dorfmann David Frakt isn’t easily intimidated by public-speaking assignments. A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and a defense attorney, Frakt is best known for securing the 2009 release of the teenage Guantánamo detainee Mohammad Jawad. He did so by helping to convince a military…

U.S. Justice In 2007, the head of the FBI’s Cyber Crime Fraud unit, Leslie Bryant, issued a stern warning to Americans: “You can go to Vegas. You can go to Atlantic City. You can go to a racetrack. You can go to those places and gamble legally. But don’t do it online. It’s against the law.” Four…

Much of Givaudan’s business—which generates nearly four billion dollars a year—is built on deceiving our senses when we eat. The consumption of food flavorings is one of the modern era’s most profound collective acts of submission to illusion. Photographs by Hans Gissinger Growing up, Michelle Hagen…

Italian mobsters climbed by way of crime. For black criminals, the story has changed. Illustration by Leslie Herman. In 1964, the anthropologist Francis Ianni was introduced to a man in a congressional waiting room. His name was Philip Alcamo. People called him Uncle Phil, and he was, in the words…

(Illustration: Emory Allen) Just outside the Benrath Senior Center in Düsseldorf, Germany, is a bus stop at which no bus stops. The bench and the official-looking sign were installed to serve as a “honey trap” to attract patients with dementia who sometimes wander off from the facility, trying to…

Vincent Smothers thought that it would be a job like any other. In the summer of 2007, he told me, his friend Marzell Black asked him for a gun for his mother’s boyfriend. Smothers didn’t sell guns, and he told him so. A few months later, Marzell amended his request, saying, “That dude who was…

Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer,…

Curatorial staff and art handlers placing artwork on the sixth floor for the Whitney’s inaugural exhibition,“America Is Hard to See.” The New New Museum How the Whitney might just solve the impossible problem of contemporary art. Curatorial staff and art handlers placing artwork on the sixth floor…

I hear Art Garfunkel before I see him, singing to himself as he drifts across the hotel lobby in a blue T-shirt, heading for the lifts. At 73 his golden curls have become white dandelion seeds, and he is not as tall as you might imagine — an illusion that was probably created during all those years…

Richard Prince’s Instagram screenshots at Frieze Art Fair in New York. (Marco Scozzaro/Frieze) The Internet is the place where nothing goes to die. Those embarrassing photos of your high school dance you marked “private” on Facebook? The drunk Instagram posts? The NSFW snapchats? If you use social…

O n December 2, 2010, FIFA president Sepp Blatter stood before a giant blue screen at his organization’s headquarters in Zurich and announced the two countries that had won the rights to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. After hours of presentations and last-ditch lobbying efforts from Prince…

Six of TV's most provocative female comedians talk sexism, sex scenes, penis bags and why women need to stop apologizing: "I think people hate women. I don't think they want to hear a woman talk for too long," says Schumer. This story first appeared in the June 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter…