Dopamine gets blamed for fuelling celebrity addictions – including to cup cakes – but its brain function is more complicated that that. Photograph: foodfolio/Alamy I f there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something…

Illustration by Dan Cassaro Don’t let the name fool you. Coca-Cola’s Simply Orange juice is anything but pick, squeeze, and pour. That cold glass of 100 percent liquid sunshine on the breakfast table is the product of a sophisticated industrial juice complex. Satellite imagery, complicated data…

As he awaited the outcome of the voting on election night, November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln sat expectantly in the Springfield, Illinois, telegraph office. The results came in around 2 a.m.: Lincoln had won. Even as jubilation erupted around him, he calmly kept watch until the results came in from…

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The summons to Capitol Hill didn’t bode well. It was May 2011, and Mayor Vince Gray and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown had been called to testify on the city’s fiscal stability before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subcommittee on the District of Columbia. The short hearing…

Tomorrow is the funeral for Aaron Swartz, the programmer and sometime activist who killed himself last Friday, while facing federal trial. No one knows, or will ever really know, what caused Swartz to take his own life. But his suicide, in the face of possible bankruptcy and serious prison time, has…

At about noon today, the Atlantic put on a very snug hair shirt, issuing a statement of apology and regret for having posted on its website Church of Scientology “Sponsor Content” yesterday. The Scientology advertisement, composed by tone-deaf propagandists unable to write a sentence about the…

In prime time’s world of wish fulfillment, Freaks and Geeks was the opposite: 18 episodes that nailed the sad, hilarious unfairness of teen life. The cult following for its single, 1999 season—still growing, on Netflix—would herald a new school of comedy led by executive producer Judd Apatow. He,…

"It's like The Matrix ," said TV writer Rob Long (left). "We can unplug you and you can see that things are actually kind of bad." (Photo: Joe Hagan) A steady downpour started in the afternoon as we motored through steel-gray waters back to Florida. Tomorrow would be a new gray dawn in America. Up…

Photo: Photography by Marilyn Minter; Hair by Kayla Michele at Atelier Management using KMS; Makeup by Walter Obal at Atelier Management using Chanel Fiona Apple was upstairs, alone, stalking the small suite of her boutique hotel in Soho. It was noon, in May, and she had arrived in New York, the…

The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film The Blues Brothers became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. From the 1973 meeting of two young comic…

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On a gray Wednesday morning in October, the car headed west on the Lincoln Highway Bridge hit 100 miles per hour and I started to worry it might hurtle off into the tangle of rusted-out warehouses and smoke stacks that pass for a landscape in northeastern New Jersey. I peeked over the driver's…

Marlon Brando Most Japanese girls giggle. The little maid on the fourth floor of the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, was no exception. Hilarity, and attempts to suppress it, pinked her cheeks (unlike the Chinese, the Japanese complexion more often than not has considerable color), shook her plump…

It’s the dark romance of the French Foreign Legion: haunted men from everywhere, fighting anywhere, dying for causes not their own. Legionnaires need war, certainly, and Afghanistan is winding down. But there’s always the hopeless battle against rogue gold miners in French Guiana . . . I. The Farm…

One of the most controversial political attack ads of the year didn’t originate with an actual candidate or political party. It came from Stephen Colbert. Or more accurately, “Stephen Colbert,” his satirical alter ego. The ad was funded by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, a super PAC…

Cawsey. (Photo: Jackson Waite) I was looking for an apartment, which in Manhattan means you have to sell your soul. Your W-2s are not signed in enough places; your hair does not make enough money. You refresh Craigslist every 40 seconds and wait for virgin blue links. Doesn’t matter, because nothing…

Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, has promoted strict voter-I.D. laws. Credit Photograph by Lauren Lancaster Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly…

Photos by Nadia Shira Cohen Dick with his grandsons, closing his makeshift pig pen for the season as winter approaches. Dick Smith, known as the "Grandfather" of Oniontown, breeds pigs in order to sell them for slaughter. There are certain places that, by their very nature, seem forsaken.…

Girls’ Generation—Tiffany, Yoona, Sooyoung, Taeyeon, Hyoyeon, Sunny, Seohyun, Yuri, and Jessica—the dominant girl group in Asia, is being positioned to conquer the West as well. Credit Photographs by Matthew Niederhauser / Institute It was five o’clock on a Sunday in May, two hours before showtime,…

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Peter Sunde Enlarge / Since the trial, Sunde has hit the public speaking circuit. As shown here, he spoke at Campus Party Mexico in 2010. Campus Party Mexico Of the four, Peter Sunde has been the most outspoken about the case. That’s probably because between August 2005 and August 2009 he was the…

Thunder rumbled and rain pattered on the leaves as Connor Stevens tramped through the darkness down a wooded path to the base of the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge. A sad-eyed 20-year-old poet from the Cleveland suburbs, Stevens was crouched in the foliage, his baby face obscured by a…

You really have to work hard to get hooked on smoking opium. The Victorian-era form of the drug, known as chandu, is rare, and the people who know how to use it aren’t exactly forthcoming. But leave it to an obsessive antiques collector to figure out how to get to addicted to a 19th-century drug.…

Credit Illustration by Peter Arkle In July, 2010, Kyle Strode, a forty-six year-old chemistry professor from Helena, Montana, ran the Missoula Marathon. Completing the 26.2-mile distance in two hours and forty-seven minutes, he placed fourth out of thirteen hundred and twenty-two finishers, and won…

The Book of Mormon was a sacred object meant to be venerated; the fact that it existed mattered as much as what it said. Credit Illustration by Shout Stereotypes and pigeonholes can, in a stable multiethnic society, act as sanctuaries as much as cells. In the heyday of urban ethnic immigration, even…

"W hat's going on here? I'm a model," Lisette Lee shouted, flinging open the door of her Escalade and assuming her most indignant expression. Her Chanel heels clicked on the tarmac, police lights flashed and sirens blared, as she faced down federal agents swarming in with guns drawn. Behind Lee, the…

NOCTURNAL Sal Strazzullo has developed an unusual niche: representing celebrities, whether major or minor, who get themselves in trouble after dark. Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times THE New York bar, like all complex professional societies, has every sort of specialty you can think of:…

Unlike ants, moles, gophers and skinks, humans aren’t instinctively tunneling creatures. When we go underground, we are partly admitting that we’ve made a mess on the surface and partly showing off. In Manhattan, where street traffic tends to stall, only one subway runs the length of the East Side.…