Y ou can learn a lot about the way the movie industry works in a given moment by looking at its successes (whether accidental or engineered), but often you can learn even more by looking at its failures — the long-in-development projects that never make it to the screen, the labors of love gone…

A Georgia chicken farmer hoped to find financial independence in ethical foie gras. Things got weird. O n a cold, rainy afternoon last fall, Brandon Chonko showed me how to herd a gaggle of geese. The lesson came at the end of a long day spent building a new fence on the western side of his…

Credit Photo Illustration by Merlin Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights.” Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till…

With Barack Obama sworn in for a second term—the first president in either party since Ronald Reagan to be elected twice with popular majorities—the GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party. The civil rights pageantry of the inauguration—Abraham Lincoln's Bible…

John Belushi in Animal House , 1978 Courtesy of Universal Pictures A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico , Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations…

"Not since the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, was captured in Afghanistan over a decade ago has there been such a riveting story of a Marin kid gone wrong." Max Wade at his preliminary hearing, October 2012 Leylla and Max in the ’90s Max and his baby brother, Alex. Update, 10/31: On Wednesday,…

longform: "Down and Out in the Top 10" Grizzy Bear and the crappy economics of indie rock stardom: http://t.co/Njryqa2o (@ntabebe, @nymag)

Getting around the OS The Haiku operating system is fast and responsive, just as BeOS was back in the day. The kernel is based on the open-source NewOS , which is a 32-bit preemptive multitasking, modular kernel written by former BeOS engineer Travis Geiselbrecht. The user interface is a direct…

There is usually no mistaking the act or intent of extending a middle finger. Take John Swartz, for example. In May 2006, Mr. Swartz was a passenger in a car in a rural part of upstate New York when he spotted a police car that was using a radar speed-tracking device. Mr. Swartz, a Vietnam veteran…

A recent article is examining the possibility that a contingent of soldiers from the Mediterranean fought at the Battle of Talas River in 36 BC, but instead of being Roman forces, new research suggests they may have been descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great. Christopher A. Matthew’s…

Beneath the catchy dance beat and hilarious scenes of Seoul's poshest neighborhood, there might be a subtle message about wealth, class, and value in South Korean society. Reddit Park Jaesang is an unlikely poster boy for South Korea's youth-obsessed, highly lucrative , and famously vacuous pop…

You knew from the very start—it was the London Symphony Orchestra playing a painfully tender version of Elgar’s “Nimrod”—that Danny Boyle was going for heartstrings in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Nimrod is, perhaps, the Brits’ “Appalachian Spring.” As the “Cambridge Companion to…

To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more. One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a…

Simon grumbles

WASTE But Frankel, the original creator of Winamp and Gnutella, wasn't out of ideas. Unfortunately, his ideas all made AOL furious. Just as the RIAA was prepping lawsuits against Gnutella users , Frankel kept butting heads with AOL corporate headquarters in Dulles, Virginia—trying to get Nullsoft…

Pakistani intelligence officials warned Shahzad to curb his reporting, which revealed links between the military and Al Qaeda. Credit Illustration by SEAN MCCABE On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the…

Tang Jie (center) believes that American attempts to contain China may spark “a new Cold War.” Credit Photograph by Ian Teh / Panos Pictures On the morning of April 15th, a short video entitled “2008 China Stand Up!” appeared on Sina, a Chinese Web site. The video’s origin was a mystery: unlike the…

Senator Bob Kerrey's hands trembled slightly as he began to read six pages of documents that had just been handed to him. It was late 1998; the papers were nearly 30 years old. On the face of it, they were routine "after action" combat reports of the sort filed by the thousands during the Vietnam…