Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words) Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison , by Sabine Heinlein . Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent…

Peter Molyneux is crying. I’m not sure how to react to this. Legendary game designers don’t often get emotional with the press. But here’s Molyneux, who has made so many games and done so many interviews over the past two decades, openly weeping into my voice recorder. We’re talking about promises.…

Check out our slideshow of Social Club vests HERE! The guy is drunk. Obviously drunk. Shitfaced. Instead of joining the 10-person line politely waiting to use the men's room at Disney California Adventure, the twentysomething in an oversized T-shirt and low-slung hat cuts in front of the surprised,…

Last April, Dong Nguyen, a quiet 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had a day job programming location devices for taxis, spent a holiday weekend making a mobile game. He wanted it to be simple but challenging, in the spirit of the Nintendo games he grew up playing. The…

I'm standing in front of Space Mountain worrrying I won't be able to find the Neverlanders Social Club. It's an ordinary Sunday in Disneyland in November—sunny and beautiful in that Californian way and packed to the gills with tourists—and I'm concerned I'll miss them in all the hubbub. They told me…

Editor’s note: David “The Masked Man” Shoemaker (Grantland’s wrestling guru) and Bill Simmons (35-year wrestling fan) spent the past 10 days digesting the new WWE Network, which launched on February 24 and caused a multimedia riot in the wrestling community. Is this one of the great moments in WWE…

Jump to The flight to Thailand was long. Stephen de Souza wished it were longer. Over the previous decade, from 1982 to 1992, de Souza had established himself as a screenwriting wunderkind. Most screenwriters can't land one blockbuster; he had a baker's dozen to his name, including Commando , The…

Zwirner at home, with a painting by Raymond Pettibon. “Nobody’s selling expensive stuff like we do with the frequency we do,” Zwirner said. “This is an industry in its golden age.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic Very important people line up differently from you and me. They don’t want to stand behind…

As a longtime film critic, I’ve noticed a strange contradiction. I became a critic because I love movies, yet I feel professionally obligated to take umbrage with movies that feel too much like movies. I get irritated when confronted with a plot I’ve seen countless times before, or characters that…

The following is excerpted from Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s , which is available now on Amazon . $13 Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers… From amazon 14 bought by readers GMG may get a commission Buy now If one were in with…

A cyclist passes a steam vent in the financial district of Toronto; not a welcoming city on two wheels. Photograph: Andy Clark/Reuters. Story courtesy of Mosaic I t was just another morning commute. That is, until a bus driver ran a red light, turned right, and drove straight into Ann-Doerthe Hass…

Paul W.S. Anderson is a visionary director. Those visions include a red-drenched adaptation of the most popular fighting video game of all time, a mash-up of two iconic science-fiction monsters, and a steampunked take on a classic 19th-century adventure novel. But they are visions nonetheless, and…

When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’s headline was typical of the coverage: “ MIAMI ARTIST…

Sasha Frere-Jones: "Ukraine has essentially been frozen in time since independence.” — "Ukraine, Putin, and the West,” in @nplusonemag. http://t.co/P5dqjpyoj8

And the Oscar goes to… The gold trophy winners are announced, the red carpets rolled out, and yet another year at the Academy Awards passes without a Best Title Design category. So why isn’t there an Oscar for Best Title Design? After all, there are Academy Awards for other artistic and technical…

From a distance, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange looked like a towering example of renegade entrepreneurism. But on the inside, according to some who were there, Mt. Gox was a messy combination of poor management, neglect, and raw inexperience. Its collapse into bankruptcy last week — and the…

CALLING THE SHOTS Cinematographer Roger Deakins, photographed in Sydney, Australia. He is the snowy Beatles mop behind the lens of an award-winning list— Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, No Country for Old Men, A Beautiful Mind —and has worked with moviedom’s greats: Sam Mendes, Martin Scorsese, Ron…

In September, David Gilmour, a writer and visiting professor at the University of Toronto, said in an interview that he tends to teach books by "serious heterosexual guys"; the interview went off like a starter pistol, and much of the Canadian literary internet responded, in both opposition and…

Image: Ubisoft/Far Cry 3 Despite the fact that a legitimate " queer games scene " has developed on the outskirts of the game industry, the mainstream has remained hesitant to create even a single gay protagonist. There are many openly gay developers working at large game companies, however, so why…

I'll tell you right now that I am not a celebrity. I know that may be hard to believe what with my extravagant lifestyle and frequent trips to both Marshalls and Ross for quality clothing at bargain prices. However, I've always wanted to live like a rock star (well, a rock star in their 50s who just…

Oh hey, the Oscars are on Sunday night! And congratulations to America's celebritiesfor enduring another painfully long and arduous awards season. YOU POOR THINGS! Being shuttled from red carpet to red carpet,forced to wear nice clothes, asked the same dumb questions over and over again("How's it…

Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but…

As he reaches his 50th birthday, MJ is still looking for one more ass to kick To continue reading this story, click here.

It was 5:30 in the morning when Kenya Mire looked down at her baby girl, Kendyll, who was curled up tight on a foldaway crib. “Night, night,” Kendyll had just murmured in her quiet, serious way. At 20 months, she was picking up all sorts of words, like “baby,” the name of the doll she kept nearby,…

photograph by Priscilla Iezzi About 40 miles north of the Irvine headquarters of In‑N‑Out Burger, the noonday sun makes the gritty industrial landscape of Baldwin Park simmer like a Double-Double fresh off the grill. Hulking tractor-trailers emblazoned with the fast-food chain’s familiar logo…

One hundred years ago, Joe Knowles stripped down to his jockstrap, said goodbye to civilization, and marched off into the woods to prove his survival skills. He was the reality star of his day. For eight weeks, rapt readers followed his adventures in the Boston Post . He returned home to a hero’s…

Photo: Christopher Anderson/ Magnum Photos/New York Magazine At a quiet table in a dimly lit Lower East Side Italian restaurant, Lauren Urasek, a poised 23-year-old makeup artist with a Cleopatra haircut and cherry-red lipstick, is lit by the glow of her iPhone as she flips through online-dating…

WASHINGTON, November 13 (By Carl Schreck for RIA Novosti) – It was a battle of the titans that defined the early 1980s as the Cold War was hitting its peak: Atari vs. Commodore. And Soviet diplomats, it seems, preferred Atari. With the Commodore 64 home computer pounding competitors, a Silicon…

In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandwich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it’s a widget.” Construction by Ian Wright / Photograph by Ed Park Amazon is a global…

When I first did research on Walmart’s workplace practices in the early 2000s, I came away convinced that Walmart was the most egregiously ruthless corporation in America. However, ten years later, there is a strong challenger for this dubious distinction—Amazon Corporation. Within the corporate…

Gone Home was an inspired, beautifully heartfelt thing that clearly had a profound affect on people of multiple codes and creeds. It was powerful, delicate, and… we’ve probably said everything about it that it’s possible for one website largely made up of hairy men to say. At some point, it becomes…

In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product on TVs, movie screens, or radio dials, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness , The A.V. Club talks to…

Oregon Trail , the computer simulation that sends students on a sometimes perilous journey west in the 19th century and that made its way into classrooms across the country in the 1980s and 1990s (and beyond), was originally created by three student teachers — two who led math classrooms and one who…