Birdman : The Pigeon King and the Ponzi Scheme
In a typical Ponzi scheme, like Bernie Madoff’s, the scammer moves money between investors, to pay what he claims are dividends on an investment that doesn’t actually exist. But Galbraith didn’t have a...
View ArticleMayweather : The Boxer and the Batterer
An essay on Floyd Mayweather Jr. as both : I can’t, of course, say what’s behind Mayweather’s serial abuse — physical, verbal, or emotional — of women. Men who are rich beat women; men who are poor do,...
View ArticleThe Age Of Loneliness
There’s just so much in this longform that I could not settle for just one or two paragraphs : In the time I’d been gone, there had been a shift. Of course I had changed, and the trees had grown...
View ArticleInside Job
A story on Raj Rajaratnam’s inside job and an unsuspected collateral damage: In my many conversations with Das, I had failed to explain to her what insider trading was, how she ended up a millionaire...
View ArticleCharlie Brown Never Found His Little Red-Haired Girl, but We Did
The romance between the artist, Charles Schulz, and his muse, the little girl with the red hair : In the Peanuts Sunday strip that ran on November 19, 1961, Charlie Brown sits down to lunch, as usual,...
View ArticleEl Chapo Speaks
Sean Penn : I take no pride in keeping secrets that may be perceived as protecting criminals, nor do I have any gloating arrogance at posing for selfies with unknowing security men. But I’m in my...
View ArticleWhy People Pay To Read The New York Times
In the United States, the ranks of journalists keep shrinking. As I travel around the world for The New York Times, I hear from journalists everywhere about the painful downsizing happening across the...
View ArticleThe Little Professor Syndrome
Edward Hopper On the Asperger syndrome : At first glance, this brightly decorated room is no different from that of any other elementary school. Shelves are filled with storybooks; on the chalkboard, a...
View ArticleDoes the left have a future?
No party can exist forever. Political traditions can decline, and then take on new forms; some simply become extinct. All that can be said with certainty is that if the left is to finally leave the...
View ArticleKanye West Is A Human Being
Long life to The Outline, Joshua Topolsky’s new venture : The pattern is by now familiar: a famous person makes a comment that inspires controversy and, in turn, sets off a public discussion about a...
View ArticleInside Quebec’s Great, Multi-Million-Dollar Maple-Syrup Heist
It was the Lufthansa heist of the syrup world. In the summer of 2012, on one of those July days when the first hint of autumn cools the northern forest, Michel Gauvreau began his precarious climb up...
View ArticleUntamed
On making friends with animals—the story of my life : There was a canopy of leaves over my head. Once I moved beyond it, the moon lit my path, so I turned off the flashlight. I’d expected Carol to be...
View ArticleThe Great A.I. Awakening
Illustration by Pablo Delcan And yet the rise of machine learning makes it more difficult for us to carve out a special place for us. If you believe, with Searle, that there is something special about...
View ArticleHow to Hide $400 Million
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson This didn’t just threaten Oesterlund’s fortune. It also had the potential to carve open a portal into the world of offshore finance, a place that the global elite has...
View ArticleThe Life and Death of the Kid Who Hunted the Taliban
That night, as darkness enveloped the family’s three-story mud-brick compound, Wasil’s uncles shuffled Hamidullah’s bloodied corpse inside. The boy drew close, his cheeks wet with tears. In the low...
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