Longreads

A Reliably Fun Thing I’ll Do Every Other Year Or So

The luxury cruise is, often, a vacation to be endured: the rigid structure, embarrassing pampering, forced interaction, the terrible predictability of it all. What could compel a person to keep shipping out, year after year?

The Cyclist as Cannibal

In this excerpt from Braking Bad, about disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong and the greatest doping conspiracy in sports history, we ask what kind of man is best fit to excel at the Tour de France?

|| Image by Julia Dickens
Nature’s Most Perfect Killing Machine

Ebola is nightmare fuel: a biological doomsday device conspiring with our bodies to murder us in uniquely gruesome fashion. It’s also killed fewer than 2,000 people. How has a virus with such a modest body count so fiercely captured the darkest corners of our imagination?

Prey

In the aftermath of rape, and throughout the two-year-long rape trial, I was obsessed with dangerous animals. This is how I went from prey to predator.

|| A 19th century Japanese scroll depicting traditional whaling in Wakayama Prefecture.
Exploding Whales, Harbingers of Doom

This spring, three blue whale carcasses washed up on the Newfoundland shore, spurring a panic about whale explosions. These fears, while unfounded, were indicative of something much worse—and marked a new, ominous chapter in the whale’s evolving symbolic import.

|| Gordon Ramsay calling out an order to the brigade de cuisine
The Devolution of the Modern Kitchen

How did the restaurant kitchen become the frantic, sweltering, tyrannical hellhole it is today? A history of the back-of-the-house and its rigorous hierarchies.

Eating the Heart of Richard Maxwell

A dubious, obsessive attempt to understand the work of the playwright/director behind Neutral Hero, Isolde, and Burger King.

|| Pub-Bar El Avion in Costa Rica, and former deputy-director of the National Security Council Oliver North
Ollie’s Vanishing Legacy: Revisiting the Iran-Contra Affair

The complex web of deceit that was the Iran-Contra affair is now mostly forgotten, subsumed by Ronald Reagan’s reputation as a conservative hero. But the CIA’s interference in Nicaragua is impossible to ignore, even if the remnants of it whither away.

A Quiet Slaughter

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, a Hutu from Burundi shares his story of surviving President Paul Kagame’s alleged secret war of vengeance, one obscured by the fight to overthrow Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

What Baseball Still Doesn’t Get About Injury and Mental Health

Ryan Freel’s 2012 suicide shed light on the rarely mentioned issue of mental health in baseball. Dirk Hayhurst’s new book goes even further, chronicling his own struggles in the majors, and the culture that tries to keep those kinds of discussions quiet.