Tag Archives: long-reads

W hen Sara Benincasa first met Ben Kissel in 2010, she was smitten with him almost immediately. Tall and handsome with boyish features, a six-foot-seven-inch frame, and an aw-shucks Midwestern mien, Kissel was working as a stand-up comic in New York City, just like she was at the time; they …

When I first broke the story of Clearview AI in The New York Times in January 2020, people were shocked. Some were horrified. The tiny start-up had scraped 3 billion faces from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites without anyone’s consent to build a groundbreaking facial recognition app. …

P atricio Manuel sits silently backstage at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. He’s in the back corner of the white-tarpaulined gazebo as he waits to be called to the ring of the 3,000-seater events center here in Indio, California. Inside the thin tent walls, he can hear the hubbub of …

Almost no figure from the early days of the internet was more misunderstood and maligned than Julia Allison. In the mid-2000s, Allison dominated the online world as one of the first multi-platform content creators. But practically no one recognized her as such, in part because there wasn’t language to talk …

S ince DuQuan Myers died six years ago, he’s come back in ways that are mysterious and magical and hard to explain. It started the day of his funeral, when the doves that were released over his coffin refused to fly home, perching instead in the oak tree just above …

J uly 19, 2003: It’s well after midnight in San Francisco, and the Exploding Hearts — Adam Cox, Terry Six, Matt Fitzgerald, and Jeremy Gage —are ready to play for a packed house at a bar called Thee Parkside. The show is a “last-minute thing,” Six, the band’s guitarist, remembers. …

In 1991, when Chele Roland was a college student, regular customers at the diner where she worked persuaded her to come to the Los Angeles International Church of Christ, a protestant evangelical church with a handful of locations in the greater L.A. area. “I was always a seeker and a …

N ov. 27, 2007, was a hot and humid Tuesday in Manila, Philippines, and David Bunevacz was getting the shit kicked out of him. He had been invited to the home of one of his partners in a recent cosmetic surgery venture, the Beverly Hills 6750 clinic in Makati City, …

B y the time Kate Bush called Zeke Manyika to ask if he would drum on her new record, he had already helped reinvent one great band of the Eighties and launch two more. There was Orange Juice, Scottish indie’s consummate cosmopolitans. There was his playing on the first singles …

& #8220;Who’s Swagg Man?” the 36-year-old rapper currently wanted by the law poses the question to himself in a text to me. “I was born an artist … Swagg Man is a fictif [fictional] guy. Same like all artist[s].” I’ve been trying to talk to Swagg Man for weeks. He …