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AI • Longreads
The Memory Maker
AI-generated recreations begin interfering with users’ own memories. Immediate hook, deep question about reality and identity.
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AI-generated recreations begin interfering with users’ own memories. Immediate hook, deep question about reality and identity.
A Nigerian professor escapes one kidnapping only to be abducted again; ransom culture becomes personal and almost unbelievable.
Sinatra refuses the interview, so Talese profiles the entire orbit around him instead—one of the defining magazine profiles.
A dying woman’s husband watches his best friend move in and quietly take over the impossible work of helping a family survive.
Silicon Valley before the mythology hardened: the story of Robert Noyce, Fairchild, Intel, and the culture that made modern technology possible.
Jobs, recently pushed out of Apple, is rebuilding himself around NeXT. A classic portrait of ambition, control, charisma, and work as identity.
The pieces we’d recommend years from now without hesitation.
AI-generated recreations begin interfering with users’ own memories. Immediate hook, deep question about reality and identity.
A superb piece of explanatory reporting that makes geological time feel immediate and terrifying.
A fossil site may preserve the very day of the asteroid impact. Science told like an adventure story.
A landmark narrative about an avalanche, decision-making, and survival; still a benchmark for digital longform.
An Antarctic obsession told with extraordinary momentum and character.
A death-row case collides with changing fire science; a devastating example of institutional certainty outrunning evidence.
A meditation on loss that moves from lost objects to lost people without becoming sentimental.
Sinatra refuses the interview, so Talese profiles the entire orbit around him instead—one of the defining magazine profiles.
A retired baseball god who dislikes publicity becomes the subject of a portrait built from observation, silence, and the people around him.
A furious, funny, deeply human portrait of Ted Williams—ambition, rage, greatness, and the cost of wanting to be the best ever.
Washington’s most successful preschool entertainer turns out to have a chaotic private life and an almost mystical connection with small children.
Nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots die in a wildfire; the reporting reconstructs how an elite crew ended up trapped.
A dying woman’s husband watches his best friend move in and quietly take over the impossible work of helping a family survive.
A portrait of a legendary war correspondent whose courage, wit, trauma, and compulsion to bear witness ultimately cost her life.
Capote gets Marlon Brando talking late into the night in Kyoto and turns an interview into one of the classic celebrity portraits.
Ricky Jay’s sleight of hand, obsessions, scholarship, and evasiveness become a nearly perfect subject for a profile about wonder.
Richard Pryor’s life and art become a portrait of comedy, race, self-destruction, empathy, and a performer who changed the form.
Ted Williams’s final game becomes literature: a farewell to a player, a city, and the strange loneliness of greatness.
The ticket-booth queen of the Bowery is tough, funny, generous, and unforgettable—a model of the profile as character discovery.
Bill Bradley as a Princeton basketball phenom: talent, discipline, anticipation, and the habits behind seemingly effortless excellence.
An ex-moonshiner turned NASCAR pioneer becomes the perfect Tom Wolfe subject: velocity, class, spectacle, and the birth of a new South.
Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay is already inventing himself in public—funny, theatrical, ambitious, and impossible to ignore.
Silicon Valley before the mythology hardened: the story of Robert Noyce, Fairchild, Intel, and the culture that made modern technology possible.
Mailer turns the 1960 Democratic convention and a young John Kennedy into literary political journalism rather than campaign coverage.
Jordan at fifty is still fueled by slights, competition, and the ghost of the player he used to be—a remarkable portrait of greatness after greatness.
After his father's death, Tiger’s obsession with Navy SEALs becomes a way into the private war behind the collapse of the world’s greatest golfer.
A story about custom-car culture that helped blow up the conventions of magazine journalism; exuberant, strange, and unmistakably Wolfe.
One company of American soldiers trains at Fort Dix and enters Vietnam fifty days later; immersive reporting on men moving toward war.
A minute-by-minute reconstruction of the Beslan school siege, built from survivors’ memories; terrifying, controlled, and extraordinarily reported.
Jobs, recently pushed out of Apple, is rebuilding himself around NeXT. A classic portrait of ambition, control, charisma, and work as identity.
Jobs near the end of his life: mortality, control, design, adoption, and the almost religious meaning he attached to technology.
Theranos begins to unravel and the piece asks the core business question: how did so many sophisticated people see only what Elizabeth Holmes wanted them to see?
Employees look back on the intoxicating rise of WeWork and the barefoot founder who turned office rentals into a $47 billion belief system.
WeWork's failed IPO becomes a character study in founder worship, weak governance, venture-capital excess, and the inability to tell the boss no.
The FTX collapse viewed through the family, ethics, ambition, and intellectual culture that helped form Sam Bankman-Fried.
A rare interview with one of Wall Street’s most secretive traders: talent, temper, art, money, trading instinct, and the mythology around SAC Capital.
Federal prosecutors close in on SAC Capital in a Wall Street thriller about information, incentives, loyalty, and the limits of what a founder can claim not to know.
A bestselling novelist’s biography starts unraveling under meticulous reporting.
A portrait of a hugely influential science podcaster that asks what happens when authority, optimization culture, and private behavior collide.
A serious profile of a man who built a career out of getting hurt for laughs—and what remains when the stunts stop.
Sinatra refuses the interview, so Talese profiles the entire orbit around him instead—one of the defining magazine profiles.
A retired baseball god who dislikes publicity becomes the subject of a portrait built from observation, silence, and the people around him.
A furious, funny, deeply human portrait of Ted Williams—ambition, rage, greatness, and the cost of wanting to be the best ever.
Washington’s most successful preschool entertainer turns out to have a chaotic private life and an almost mystical connection with small children.
A portrait of a legendary war correspondent whose courage, wit, trauma, and compulsion to bear witness ultimately cost her life.
Capote gets Marlon Brando talking late into the night in Kyoto and turns an interview into one of the classic celebrity portraits.
Ricky Jay’s sleight of hand, obsessions, scholarship, and evasiveness become a nearly perfect subject for a profile about wonder.
Richard Pryor’s life and art become a portrait of comedy, race, self-destruction, empathy, and a performer who changed the form.
Edna Buchanan, Miami’s legendary crime reporter, gets a profile as vivid and strange as the murders she covered.
Fab Five Freddy at the height of early hip-hop New York—part personality profile, part time capsule of a scene.
Bob Gibson after baseball: pride, isolation, competitiveness, and the question of what an athlete does when the game is gone.
Bill James—the outsider who reinvented baseball analysis—joins the Red Sox and brings statistics, obsession, and skepticism inside the game.
The ticket-booth queen of the Bowery is tough, funny, generous, and unforgettable—a model of the profile as character discovery.
Bill Bradley as a Princeton basketball phenom: talent, discipline, anticipation, and the habits behind seemingly effortless excellence.
A movie star’s path from latchkey kid and stripper to leading man is told through a loose, funny, unusually intimate magazine profile.
Before Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, Lynch is already unmistakably Lynch: strange objects, odd rituals, artistic conviction, and Dune looming over him.
An ex-moonshiner turned NASCAR pioneer becomes the perfect Tom Wolfe subject: velocity, class, spectacle, and the birth of a new South.
Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay is already inventing himself in public—funny, theatrical, ambitious, and impossible to ignore.
Jordan at fifty is still fueled by slights, competition, and the ghost of the player he used to be—a remarkable portrait of greatness after greatness.
After his father's death, Tiger’s obsession with Navy SEALs becomes a way into the private war behind the collapse of the world’s greatest golfer.
Floyd Patterson after two crushing losses to Sonny Liston: defeat, dignity, shame, and the lonely work of trying to become someone again.
Nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots die in a wildfire; the reporting reconstructs how an elite crew ended up trapped.
A dying woman’s husband watches his best friend move in and quietly take over the impossible work of helping a family survive.
Ted Williams’s final game becomes literature: a farewell to a player, a city, and the strange loneliness of greatness.
Mailer turns the 1960 Democratic convention and a young John Kennedy into literary political journalism rather than campaign coverage.
A story about custom-car culture that helped blow up the conventions of magazine journalism; exuberant, strange, and unmistakably Wolfe.
One company of American soldiers trains at Fort Dix and enters Vietnam fifty days later; immersive reporting on men moving toward war.
A minute-by-minute reconstruction of the Beslan school siege, built from survivors’ memories; terrifying, controlled, and extraordinarily reported.
A 3M scientist follows evidence of PFAS in ordinary blood while the institution around her resists the implications.
Citadel’s founder becomes a lens on money, markets, ambition, politics, and what extreme success does to a person.
While towns across America resist data centers, one former mill town sees one as a possible economic lifeline.
Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun emerges as a larger-than-life connector, tastemaker, dealmaker, and embodiment of the music business.
Silicon Valley before the mythology hardened: the story of Robert Noyce, Fairchild, Intel, and the culture that made modern technology possible.
Jobs, recently pushed out of Apple, is rebuilding himself around NeXT. A classic portrait of ambition, control, charisma, and work as identity.
Jobs near the end of his life: mortality, control, design, adoption, and the almost religious meaning he attached to technology.
Theranos begins to unravel and the piece asks the core business question: how did so many sophisticated people see only what Elizabeth Holmes wanted them to see?
The final months of Theranos are almost absurd: lawyers, desperate fundraising, corporate denial, and Holmes behaving as if a turnaround is still possible.
Employees look back on the intoxicating rise of WeWork and the barefoot founder who turned office rentals into a $47 billion belief system.
WeWork's failed IPO becomes a character study in founder worship, weak governance, venture-capital excess, and the inability to tell the boss no.
The FTX collapse viewed through the family, ethics, ambition, and intellectual culture that helped form Sam Bankman-Fried.
A rare interview with one of Wall Street’s most secretive traders: talent, temper, art, money, trading instinct, and the mythology around SAC Capital.
Federal prosecutors close in on SAC Capital in a Wall Street thriller about information, incentives, loyalty, and the limits of what a founder can claim not to know.
Mark Walter’s rise from obscure trader to insurance-and-alternatives empire builder becomes a story about how private capital changed Wall Street—and where the model can break.
A man disappears into the Maine woods and avoids human contact for decades. Huge hook with philosophical depth.
A paleoclimatologist combines personal and geological memory to show how easily societies forget environmental extremes.
A meditation on loss that moves from lost objects to lost people without becoming sentimental.
A new mother’s account of early parenthood and the realization that her marriage is ending; intimate but intellectually sharp.
Yiyun Li writes with extraordinary clarity about losing both of her sons, six years apart.
A woman’s decades-long psychosis unexpectedly lifts after cancer treatment, raising unsettling questions about mental illness.
Chewing, tapping, and sniffing become physically intolerable for some people; a familiar annoyance turns into a genuine disorder.
People are gathering for 'Admin Nights' to do boring life tasks together; productivity quietly becomes a form of companionship.
A lot of parenting advice may really be advice that is easiest to follow when you have money, time, and support.
A 1960s Oklahoma mother obsessed with JFK’s assassination looks eerily like a prototype of today’s online conspiracy culture.
Scientists induce perception of a color ordinary humans cannot otherwise see; turns a familiar sense into something strange.
Cold War scientists ask whether mammals can reproduce in space. Weird premise, serious implications.
The tangled and mostly wrong history of psychedelic toads. Strange, funny, historical, and genuinely surprising.
An ancient skull, a disputed femur, and a bitter scientific feud over humanity’s origins.
A superb piece of explanatory reporting that makes geological time feel immediate and terrifying.
A fossil site may preserve the very day of the asteroid impact. Science told like an adventure story.
A private physician’s account opens a disturbing window into the lives of four Saudi princesses confined by their father.
Scientists debate whether a crucial Atlantic circulation could tip into collapse—and what that would do far beyond the ocean.
A Nobel-winning scientist’s work on a rare disease is inseparable from a deeply unsettling experiment in family, power, and ethics.
Europe’s cities were built for a climate that is disappearing; heat adaptation becomes an urban-design emergency.
Ticks have become a major public-health problem; the surprisingly hard question is whether society should try to kill them at scale.
Monarchs cross continents using a navigation system scientists still do not fully understand—and their numbers may finally be stabilizing.
Old assumptions said children are uniquely vulnerable to heat; newer data suggest the physiology may be more surprising.
Canada’s boreal forests are simply too vast to defend in the old way; climate change is turning wildfire into a permanent condition.
Survivors describe a Texas flood so violent that a statistical once-in-ten-thousand-years event becomes an 'inland tsunami.'
Monarch butterflies travel thousands of miles using a biological navigation system scientists are still learning to understand.
AI-generated recreations begin interfering with users’ own memories. Immediate hook, deep question about reality and identity.
A horrifying medical case becomes a window into how the brain constructs bodily experience.
Wikipedia may survive polarization because its governance is tedious enough to repel bad-faith actors.
The invisible crews and ships that repair the undersea cables carrying the internet.
North Korea allegedly placed fake remote workers inside hundreds of U.S. companies using intermediaries and borrowed identities.
A writer receives an autism diagnosis at 43 and reinterprets years of discomfort, behavior, and self-understanding.
From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient problem of proving identity becomes stranger in a world full of bots.
Harm reduction promised a humane alternative to punishment; several cities are now confronting the unintended consequences.
A broken drive can erase work, evidence, art, or the last traces of someone you loved; data recovery becomes a form of resurrection.
Humanoid robots are finally headed for homes and factories—but a robot that can backflip may still fail at a staircase or an upside-down bowl.
Anthropic gives Claude a constitution, raising a deeper question: when private companies build powerful artificial agents, who gets to write the rules?
Several cities went all-in on harm reduction; now they are reckoning with what worked, what didn’t, and what the policy left out.
Former assistant numeraries describe decades of unpaid domestic labor inside a secretive institution.
Thousands of people are training to accompany others through dying—a humane window into how modern medicine handles the end of life.
Ukrainian civilians vanish into Russia’s prison system, where law, war, and disappearance blur together.
A death-row case collides with changing fire science; a devastating example of institutional certainty outrunning evidence.
A reporter revisits a convicted would-be bomber two decades later; radicalization, redemption, and revising one’s own judgment.
A CES dispatch turns into a sharp argument about technology replacing human activity and selling it back to us.
Ubiquitous student AI use turns higher education into an experiment in what credentials mean when the work can be outsourced.
A daughter revisits recordings made by a father who secretly tapped the family phone lines during a divorce.
A father reports his three-year-old daughter dead; the case becomes a 26-year nightmare and a mystery about what actually happened.
A reporter goes to CrimeCon to understand why families shaped by famous murders repeatedly enter the true-crime spotlight.
An apparently affordable Houston apartment leads a tenant into a house with a horrific smell, a missing landlord, and a darker story.
A Nigerian professor escapes one kidnapping only to be abducted again; ransom culture becomes personal and almost unbelievable.
A close observational portrait of being twelve now—old enough to know the internet, young enough to still be visibly becoming.
A six-generation fireworks family turns pyrotechnics into art, engineering, danger, and spectacle.
Young people still want love, yet dating, sex, partnership, and marriage are all declining. Why?
A fixer who can open private doors in Rome reveals what extreme wealth buys when the product is access rather than stuff.
A Chinese man hires a Florida surrogate for triplets, then does not pick them up; a custody fight exposes a largely unregulated global industry.
A vast license-plate-camera network built for policing becomes a secret stalking tool in the hands of abusive officers.
A woman loses two partners to gun suicide, then finds herself fighting the NRA over what they left behind.
As AI-generated images spread, handwritten menus and human-made imperfection start to feel like a competitive advantage.
A writer goes looking for a genuinely good patriotic time and finds a country large enough to hold pride, disappointment, absurdity, and fellow-feeling.
Dating, sex, relationships, and marriage are all declining even though many young adults still say they want love.
A restaurant critic is asked to leave one of America’s most famous restaurants—and stays long enough for the story to get stranger.
A two-time Pulitzer winner finishes his Harlem crime trilogy and reflects on the city, family, and ghosts behind his restless reinvention.
A landmark narrative about an avalanche, decision-making, and survival; still a benchmark for digital longform.
An Antarctic obsession told with extraordinary momentum and character.
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