A new study of the porn industry tries to sidestep ideological battles, with a neutral, fact-driven approach. Photo Illustration by Sara Cwynar If you watch pornography, it’s likely that you do so on the Internet. The days when consuming pornography meant buying or borrowing a pinup magazine or…

One Easter Sunday, the Alaska Ranger —a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor—went down in the Bering Sea, 6,000 feet deep and thirty-two degrees cold. Forty-seven people were on board, and nearly half of them would spend hours floating alone in the darkness, in water so frigid it can kill a man in…

Read more Exclusive interview: Edward Snowden lauds “courageous” asylum seekers who sheltered him The covert scheme to dodge U.S. attempts to arrest Snowden could have been ripped from the pages of a spy thriller. The fugitive was disguised in a dark hat and glasses and transported by car at night…

COOROM, Uganda — Ask Dominic Ongwen’s relatives what he was like as a boy, and they give the bland answers familiar to any crime reporter probing a suspect’s background. Bright. Kind. Never any trouble. “He loved hunting birds,” remembers Madeline Akot, an aunt. “He would make a hole in a papaya…

Everyone who played Epic Mafia knew Eris, or at least knew of him. In real life, he was a 32-year-old computer programmer, who lived alone with his border

As I write this, I am producing 11.584 billion cookies per second. I employ 150 grandmas to bake my cookies, along with

The Geneva Freeport, which may be the world’s most valuable storage facility, consists of seven beige warehouses and a large

“Hey, John, can we talk for a second?”I guess I should have known. But I have absolutely no idea what’s coming.I’m in the weight room, hanging out with the guys,

What is it the poet said? Like muffled drums, our hearts beat a funeral march to the grave. And so it is that Bryant Gumbel, a man who is nothing if not prepared, keeps a list of his pallbearers. Who has been true? Who has transgressed? Though only 39, he has done it many times. Gumbel hates…

One night last fall in Los Angeles, two rising comedians met each other for drinks. The situation could’ve been awkward, since Courtney Pauroso, a sketch comic at the Groundlings theater, and Beth Stelling, a stand-up comedian who has performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Conan , didn’t actually know…

You find yourself in a hotel room in a strange city, like a character in the first scene of a videogame. Take a second to get oriented, to remember

Every day, whenever I had the chance, I’d visit the office at A and R Recording’s 799 7th Avenue facility to take a look at the scheduling “book.”

There may have been a stranger and more lurid case in the federal appeals courts in 2015 than that of Gilberto Valle, the "cannibal cop." But if there was, I haven’t heard of it -- and it doesn’t carry the same high probability of going to the U.S. Supreme Court. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of…

This essay, which is featured in our forthcoming Winter issue, was originally given as a lecture during the 2015 Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop.

I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of

Every year, roughly 40,000 people die in Minnesota. For some, it’s weeks or months before anyone finds them. Meet the crew who comes in to clean up the mess. By Andy Mannix | December 3, 2015 MinnPost photo by Mike Dvorak Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions that may be unsuitable…

I. To Believe or Not to Believe Things got weird, as they so often do, in a Walmart parking lot. Amarillo has three such behemoths, and on a bright, noticeably warm February day, seven of us had gathered at the 42nd Avenue store. The group—a small gaggle including some state and local media…

Editor’s Note: It is the policy of SBNation.com not to publish the names of minors who come forward with allegations of sexual abuse or rape. It is also the policy not to publish the names of adults who come forward with allegations of sexual abuse or rape unless those individuals are willing to be…

Mark Hogencamp in his garden adjusting some of his 1/6th figures of SS men and paratroopers.Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian M ark Hogancamp woke up one day in terrible pain in an unfamiliar room. His memory was gone. He looked up at the ceiling and tried to piece together what had happened. He…

It started out as a routine missing persons case. But by the time the internet was done with her, Elisa Lam had become a macabre celebrity, a conspiracy magnet—and the inspiration for a TV series. Look for the highlights and *footnotes On January 27, 2013, 21-year-old Elisa Lam stepped off a train…

There's something in my head about small groups, and consultancy, and coffee mornings. It's a hypothesis I'm running with to shape my own practice, and I'm darned if I can get it on paper. What's in my head isn't an essay, it's more like a mini Wikipedia of articles and associations. I chat with…

In the 1980s, psychiatrist Joel Dreyer was a fixture on Detroit’s WXYZ Channel 7. His commercials promoting his treatment center, InnerVisions, which he named after the Stevie Wonder album, sometimes ran up to five times a day. In one ad, Dreyer blocks a bartender from serving a mug of beer to a…

Max Martin, pictured at the 2015 Grammy Awards, has written nearly two dozen No. 1 songs, for performers including Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL TRAN / FILMMAGIC VIA GETTY Among the stranger aspects of recent pop music history is how so many of the biggest hits…

Photo: Mourners at Gregory Robinson's funeral Author of There Are No Children Here , The Other Side of the River and Never a City So Real , Alex Kotlowitz produced The Interrupters with filmmaker Steve James, and his May 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Blocking the Transmission of Violence”…

Why are there so many cover versions of hit songs on Spotify , YouTube, and other streaming music services? It’s not just because of searches and the artistic equivalent of SEO , but because there is an economic engine to support them: Every time one of Scofield’s songs is downloaded on iTunes, she…

From left: Sam Dolnick, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, and David Perpich. Photo: Paintings by Roberto Parada The Heirs A three-way, mostly civilized family contest to become the next publisher of From left: Sam Dolnick, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, and David Perpich. Paintings by Roberto Parada The issue of…

Born in El Paso, She Made Herself in Juárez E n route last year from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, once the most dangerous city on earth, Claudia Delfin crossed the border in fear over what she’d find on the other side, but the real trouble was in coming back. After spending a few jittery hours in…

“Information has always been currency,” says Shane, who insists on sharing only his first name. He’s an assistant to a television director. Hollywood, where Shane works, is like any other industry town—built on professional connections, on who you know as much as what you know. These days, that…

By the time anyone noticed that he hadn’t moved in at least five hours, the man on Somerton Beach must have started giving off fumes. It was about 6:30 a.m. on December 1, 1948, at the beginning of the Australian summer, and he did not look like the kind of man to sleep in the sand. He was in his…

Madeleine Fullard and Eugene de Kock.Photograph: Marc Shoul for The Guardian/Leon Botha/Gallo Images/Getty Images I n November 2014, on a vast game farm on the South Africa-Botswana border, a yellow excavator annihilated an overgrown plot set by a river. A pale blonde woman – slathered in sunscreen,…

When VNYL launched its Kickstarter campaign on December 22, 2014, the goal was to obtain $10,000 in funding. When the campaign ended 17 days later, on January 9, 2015, the project’s organizers had nearly quadrupled that goal, amassing $36,000 total. That money came in part thanks to countless news…

Long before the autopsy, London police could guess what killed Yuri Gadyukin. When they pulled his body from the river beneath the Hammersmith Bridge on July 26, 1960, they saw a bullet-sized hole that had ripped apart his skull. Authorities had been searching for the Russian director for weeks. By…

The Doublespeak of Parenting and the Double Blade of Ambition in Silicon Valley I volunteer at my son’s school in Menlo Park, which means once a month I read stories and talk about feelings with overachieving sixth graders. My son’s not in the class I visit, because I’m here, with Project…

I need to tell you something terrifying. If someone threatens to murder you on the Internet, the odds are all but certain that law enforcement will do nothing. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter how serious the threats are. Help is not coming. I should know, I’ve had 49 death threats…

There was a drug deal going down that night in rural Michigan. It was September 4, 1990, just after sunset in the town of Owosso, population 16,360. There, about 90 miles northwest of Detroit, the Shiawassee River meanders past a hamlet of low-rent, brick apartment buildings. Inside one of them, a…

D amon Albarn was a strawberry picker. Long before he was the face of Blur — the iconic English band that have just released their first new studio album in 12 years, The Magic Whip , to some of the best reviews of their career — Albarn worked in the fields of his hometown of Colchester. Picking…

The trolley problem is an ethical and psychological thought experiment. In its most basic formulation, you're the driver of a runaway trolley about to hit and certainly kill five people on the track ahead, but you have the option of switching to a second track at the last minute, killing only a…

When you are a registered sex offender in America, you lose the right to choose where you want to live. By law. Your backstory doesn't matter. Nor does the nature of your crime or your excuse. You are exiled from society, and only a few places will welcome you. Like this place in South Florida. The…

The skin did not come off like a sweater, as I’d been told it would. I’d looked at how to do it in the classic Joy of Cooking , figuring the directions for squirrel couldn’t be much different from rabbit: hook it through the heels, yank the skin down to its paws. I didn’t have a hook, but even the…

“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on…