- George R. R. Martin knows who should win the Hugo Award.
- From Oklahoma, a different song about lynching.
- There was once a leper colony on an island just a stone’s throw from the Bronx; here’s what it looks like now.
- The sinkable Chris Christie?
- Questlove on Kim Gordon: “She stays cool because she is cool, even in those rare moments when she’s not.”
- I sincerely hope that I did not break the law.
- A history of drinking in America.
- Next big threat: Rooftop solar panels.
- The Ferguson police department as organized criminal gang.
- Print and read: Ferguson, it officially time to change everything you do.
Category: Omnium Gatherum
Department of Weekend Reading: March 6, 2015
- Psst, wanna be your own police department? In Virginia, you can!
- Because sometimes, just polluting the world and buying off Congress just isn’t enough.
- A photographic tour through stuff that never, ever happened.
- One out of four Americans would get a memory chip installed in their brain … if they existed.
- Victor Hugo and Jane Austen, finally in manga form.
- You still can’t go to Cuba, but Conan O’Brien can.
- Oh, Bill: O’Reilly contradicted by his own reporting.
- Is this guy the conservative Jon Stewart?
- An exciting and likely dangerous new usage for books.
- Since robots are going to take over all work eventually anyway, maybe it’s time for Universal Basic Income?
- Americans going to Iraq and Syria to fight on behalf of Christians.
- The Greatest Generation didn’t just win world wars, they apparently had a better time overall.
- Print and read: Forget American Sniper, this is what it’s like to kill during wartime.
Department of Weekend Reading: February 27, 2015
- When an artificial intelligence plays its first Atari game.
- A tip: Don’t read that new book from MIT about jokes expecting to laugh.
- Print and read: “Your task may prove harmful to your psyche and your health in general”; Gary Shteyngart tries to survive for a week on naught but room service and Russian television.
Department of Weekend Reading: February 20, 2015
- What are they doing right up there? The “miracle of Minneapolis.”
- How forced conversions to Christianity go up in Boise.
- What’s the matter with Kansas, the homophobia edition.
- Man asks women to shush during Fifty Shades of Grey screening; receives punishment.
- There was a Prince party after the SNL anniversary show, and you missed it.
- Russia forgets history, demands $4 trillion in reparations from Germany.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Trekkie.
- The syllabus for the late David Carr’s journalism class.
- Print and read: Debates about proven science usually have little to do with science.
Department of Weekend Reading: February 13, 2015
- Brian Williams and false memories.
- Why does the United States send more people to prison than almost any other industrialized nation?
- Misplaced priorities: More prisons than colleges.
- Coming soon: The Yellow Brick Road Casino.
- Harper Lee is “happy as hell” about release of To Kill a Mockingbird followup novelGo Set a Watchman.
- Trial of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle’s accused murderer starts in the “Cowboy Capital of the World.”
- Aetna decides to actually raise pay of workers not on the executive floor.
- Print and read: Andrew Offutt was a pulp-writing factory; at his height he could polish off a novel in just three days.
- Bonus print and read: The obsession with Nazis reflects a desire for a stark moral crusade; it wasn’t always thus.
Department of Weekend Reading: February 6, 2015
- Associated Press starts using robot journalists … but at least it’s only for financial stories.
- In Donetsk, even shellfire can’t stop the circus from performing.
- Here’s what it was like for one person who grew up unvaccinated.
- An oral history of Chipotle.
- A lost cassette tape and the unreliability of memory; Or, Fugazi was awesome live.
- White men wearing Google Glass.
- Finally, a book cover that judges you.
- Print and read: If Silicon Valley is really such a meritocracy, why is the “savagely misogynistic” tech community almost entirely male?
- Bonus print and read: How the CIA and Mossad took out a Hezbollah bombmaker.
Department of Weekend Reading: January 30, 2015
- RoboCop’s guide to Renaissance Florence.
- And there goes the middle class.
- Kobani finally liberated from ISIS; Kurdish fighters “danced by firelight into the night.”
- Going Clear filmmakers on why Tom Cruise and John Travolta need to come clean about Scientology.
- The New Yorker moves downtown; ah, the memories.
- New Pope’s favorite apocalyptic novel.
- Mayor of New York: Repent, for the end is nigh.
- When in Phoenix (it could happen), check out the First Draft Book Bar.
- Print and read: Oddly, the birthplace of gay rights wasn’t America or England, it was mid-nineteenth century Germany.
Department of Weekend Reading: January 23, 2015
- Stay Florida, Florida.
- The ever-stylish and fiendishly talented Joan Didion.
- For this new James Patterson book, you’ll also get a couple nights on the town … and an explosion.
- The real blame for why the West ignored the latest round of Boko Haram attacks lies here.
- Author of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven admits that, no, he didn’t actually make it to the pearly gates.
- “Where the hell is the damn plow”? There are no libertarians in a Buffalo blizzard, it would seem.
- Guns, gun owners, and lies everyone tells.
- In the five years since Citizens United, super PACs have spent over $1 billion on federal elections, more than half of it coming from just 195 people; thanks Supreme Court!
- A little corner of France, in Israel.
- Print and read: Crusaders to ISIS: Why are so many so desperate to not call a thing by its real name?
Department of Weekend Reading: January 16, 2015
- This omnivorous list of everything that Steven Soderbergh read, watched, and listened to in 2014 is a good guide to his artistic approach.
- Ministry to New Order and the Beastie Boys: The greatest albums of 1989.
- Mark Ronson and how Michael Chabon helped write the funk.
- How could this go wrong? FAA says CNN can use their own drones.
- Also: putting people who don’t believe in science in charge of … science.
- After Tahrir Square and everything that followed, Mubarak may still end up going free.
- More delays that you could imagine and passengers opening the emergency exits at will: Flying on Chinese airlines.
- Print and read: Two academics assaulted in a parking lot realize their problems just got worse, as their attackers were cops.
Department of Weekend Reading: January 2, 2015
- Get rid of the mortgage deduction; it doesn’t even help the people it’s supposed to.
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Racism in Ukraine: At least it’s out in the open.
- What happened at the end of the NAACP march to Jefferson City after the Michael Brown killing: “Shoot thieves.”
- Print and read: “Do what you love” is great career advice, for a very few.
Department of Weekend Reading: January 2, 2015
- Letting Cuban ball players sign to the MLB without having to use drug smugglers.
- Thomas Piketty offered France’s Legion of Honor, refuses.
- Central Park at 4 a.m., between the carousers and the dog-walkers, with only the racoons for company.
- All too common: Scratch a southern conservative, find a neo-Nazi.
- New Pope: Fighting modern slavery also means avoiding low-cost goods made by coerced labor.
- Is Selma fair to LBJ?
- Could Idris Elba finally end up as the new Bond?
- Print and read: American chickenhawks and the military’s collapse into a black hole of praise.
Department of Holiday Reading: December 24, 2014
- Baldwin to Sontag and Mailer: The 10 greatest essays since 1950.
- The year in photos, so far.
- Moses and whether he could have parted the Red Sea without God’s help.
- Catherine the Great to My Friend, Dahmer: the year’s best unproduced screenplays
- The Times‘ 10 Best Books of 2014.
- Lila, Boyhood, and Transparency: If everybody basically agrees, why are there so many best-of lists for 2014?
- The Big Lebowski, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Rio Bravo among the films added to the National Film Registry in 2014.
- A roll-call of notable 2014 obituaries.
- Alamo Drafthouse stands up for, well, freedom.
- The Ramones and other great Christmas songs.
- Bill O’Reilly does his darn best to ruin another holiday season.
- Chris Rock: “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.“
- Print and read, bonus year-end edition: Daniel Pearl’s last story, smoking pot with David Brooks, and other selections from Longread’s best stories of 2014.
Department of Weekend Reading: December 19, 2014
- Holding torturers accountable: Pardon them.
- That story about the high school students who made $72 million in stocks was pretty cool; also totally untrue.
- Being smarter about Cuba, only a few decades late.
- Bipartisan Cold War rhetoric and the “borderline euphoria” with which defense contractors responded to Russia’s takeover of the Crimea.
- The coming year in global instability: Iraq and Afghanistan maybe unraveling; Somalia, less so.
- Some reasons why Keystone may not matter anymore, and everybody can go home happy(ish).
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Between Western sanctions and plummeting oil prices, life in Russia is about to get real ugly.
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Even John Yoo thinks some CIA interrogators might be vulnerable to prosecution for torture.
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Making kids repeat algebra might actually be a bad thing.
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So how do we domesticate corporate bullies like Uber into acting like responsible humans?
- Print and read: Most teachers are never taught how to teach, and other horrific oddities of the American education system.
Department of Weekend Reading: December 12, 2014
- Five-year veteran of the St. Louis PD: “I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.“
- Here’s one way to hold the last administration and the CIA accountable for torture: Pardon them.
- Not only did these guys get paid $80 million to train the CIA how to torture people, they weren’t even good at it.
- So who do millionaires want to see as president?
- GOP 2016: There can be only one.
- How do Republicans keep outperforming Democrats despite, well, reality? Ideological homogeneity and unapologetically being themselves.
- Burritos for justice.
- Time bomb: Mexico’s southern region is filling up with tens of thousands of refugees who can’t get into America and can’t go home.
- Print and read: The true history of Reagan’s fabled Chicago welfare queen was more violent and bizarre than previously known.
Department of Weekend Reading: December 5, 2014
- “Oath Keepers” on the roofs in Ferguson.
- It is nearly impossible to know how many people the police actually kill every year.
- Centuries ago in Poland, people were sometimes buried with sickles across their necks—just in case they might have been vampires.
- France gets into the ISIS fight.
- Patrolling the north with Canada’s Rangers, their Native American reserve defense force.
- Once upon a time, General Motors was Google, and before them…
- No more Social Security checks for you Nazis.
- At this office, no ugly water bottles (or anything else, really) allowed.
- Print and read: The 2010 Mother Jones investigation of the Oath Keepers quasi-insurrectionist movement that recruits cops and veterans.


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