Longreads

For twenty years, PostSecret has broadcast suburban America’s hidden truths—and revealed the limits of limitless disclosure. 

The genocidal mind is not the preserve of cartoon monsters in history books. It is a collusion of psychological habits groomed and grown in people like us when we fixate on our private gardens.

Back in high school a friend had called me Matt Damon in the drawl of Team America, but the connection to Tom Ripley felt more psychic, fundamental.

I learned to ignore the doubt that lapped at my ankles, a wave that rose every time I kissed him goodbye, left town for work or travel, and remembered, with a shock, how happily whole I felt alone.

Days after Anna Kashfi wed the actor Marlon Brando, doubts about her purported Indian heritage surfaced, destroying her Hollywood career and branding her a liar. The truth was more complicated than anyone knew.

The brief, improbable Hollywood stardom of Sabu.

On growing up trans in the Yukon.

Likeability? That’s for losers. Or so I thought, until I developed an unexplained chronic illness, and winning my doctors' approval became intertwined with my well-being.

How the actor Boris Karloff obscured his Anglo-Indian roots and reinvented himself into an icon of Hollywood horror.