I look down the valley and admire the view. I’m fishing the West Dart on Dartmoor and to me, it is one of the best places in the world to cast a fly. It’s a bold claim I know but it was enough for me to throw in a job and move to Devon so that I could spend more time fishing small streams. There are…

I t was February 21st and time was running out for Boris Johnson. The outgoing Conservative mayor of London had promised the Daily Telegraph an exclusive column in which he would declare his position in Britain’s referendum on EU membership. One Westminster rumour had it that he had written two…

‘Working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers … but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers’Photograph: John Minchillo/AP L et us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of…

Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MARLOW / MAGNUM On paper, my life seemed great. I had a dream job, a swanky apartment, and a loving girlfriend. But something was off. I couldn’t bear being chained to my desk in a stuffy office any longer. So I decided to quit and travel the world, bringing only my…

It’s been almost 35 years since the publication of James Salter’s previous novel, “Solo Faces.” In the meantime, he’s written two volumes of stories and one of poetry, a memoir, a collection of travel essays and, with his wife, Kay Eldredge Salter, a book about food. He has not been idle. Still, any…

TRANSLATIONS: 中文 (品玩) Lately, everyone’s talking about “conversational UI.” It’s the next big thing. But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It’s taken me so long to figure out why! Conversations, writes WIRED , can do things traditional GUIs can’t. Matt Hartman equates…

I bought an electric car. I’ve had it a year, so I figure it’s high time I write about the experience. I got the Chevy Spark EV, which is the electric version of the regular Chevy Spark. (the gas powered Spark sucks. Two days behind the wheel of a rental was enough for me.) The electric version, on…

M orale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with…

The bird slipped off the wire as I walked directly beneath and yet, rather than slewing away at speed, the wings flared open and it spread those elongated tail streamers, so that the silhouette acquired the asymmetrical star shape that we automatically associate with a swallow gliding at its…

‘There is also pressure on boys to conform to this extremely specific idea of how they are expected to behave’ … Laura Bates (left), pictured with Ellie Olcott.Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian Ellie Olcott : I wish I could have had this book when I was 14 or 15. It would have made navigating…

One evening last week I took a ride down the back lanes on my bike and although I could feel the last of winter's chill, blackbirds were busy nipping in and out of the hedgerows and the smell of cowshit spread over the pastures filled the still air and it felt like spring had just about arrived.…

Credit Design by Abbott Miller He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms,…

Farewell to Jack English, A True Craftsman Who Built a Good Life in the Wilderness ‘Ventana Jack’ was a remarkable carpenter, father, husband, hunter, and fisherman who thrived in the backwoods of California. We honor his passing by publishing here this story from our book. Located on a 5-acre plot…

This is HMS Dreadnought. It was launched by the Royal Navy in 1906 and was the first modern battleship, such that all previous battleships are known retrospectively as 'pre-dreadnought'. Amongst other innovations, it was the first to have turbine engines and the first to have a single large-calibre…

Illustration by Radio ‘‘You have more time than you think,’’ says Gordon Giesbrecht, a professor at the University of Manitoba who studies the physiology of being cold. Giesbrecht first fell through the ice as a child while hunting with his father. Later, he did so again repeatedly, to demonstrate…

1965-1975 Another Vietnam Unseen images of the war from the winning side by Alex Q. Arbuckle 1972 Activists meet in the Nam Can forest, wearing masks to hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation. From here in the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta, forwarding…

I like to call a lot of voters reality invariant. I’m definitely not saying they’re stupid, just that their opinions are reflections of their internal world, and are invariant to reality. Policy makers are treating these signals as true statements of their view of the world and want to change the…

Please put on sunglasses so that you are not blinded by the shininess of our newest author, Erika Nesvold. The mountains of Japan’s Yamagata prefecture are considered sacred by the Buddhists in the region. These holy sites are sparsely populated, their forests interrupted only occasionally by…

A painting of the Fire of London by an unknown artist.Photograph: Will Punter/National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. All Rights Reserved A handful of writers speak to us from the past with their lips pressed against our living ears – we feel their warm breath, smell it even. Often enough, I’ll…

John Herrman Co-editor, The @Awl The Awl Be less stupid.

Saint Vaast oysters Winter arrived so suddenly this year there was no time to shake off the warm-weather mantle of garden tomatoes and eggplant, the juiciness of ripe peaches and plump berries. Our arrière-saison , or Indian summer, was so languorous that its sudden end caused ripples of vegetal…

Isis fighters parading in Raqqa. ‘Everything convinces them that an apocalyptic process will lead to a confrontation between an army of Muslims from all over the world and others, the crusaders.’Photograph: AP A s a proud Frenchman I am as distressed as anyone about the events in Paris. But I am not…

I work some days from a small office in San Francisco, and every day, I gotta eat. For a stretch of several weeks this year, I obtained my lunch from an iPhone app called Sprig. It’s a beautiful piece of software. A trompe l’oeil table offers a compact slate of choices for lunch and dinner, all…

Ready to celebrate the dawn of a new age for the Neolithic ... Stonehenge. Photograph: Chris Hepburn/Getty Images T he cafe at the new Stonehenge visitor centre was packed; it was showery outside but inside the atmosphere was thick with the distinctive aroma of wet Gore-Tex – a smell I always…

A few weeks ago Josh and I spoke to Mike Konczal (aka Rortybomb ), and he quoted us in a piece he wrote about what a customer is worth to a bank . Since then, there has been a lot of back and forth on the topic , with some pretty heated comments on the relatively boring topic of banking economics.…

Fog creeps in over Tower Bridge in central London.Photograph: Guy Corbishley/Demotix/Corbis F og-bound. Suddenly, we have lost control of our world. This morning when I ventured out, before dawn, the November darkness had been replaced by something almost tangible. The sky had fallen in. Cycling was…