Tag Archives: longreads

I n the old chapel of a former Christian Science church in San Francisco, late-afternoon sun pours orange through the windows, and several giant servers are hard at work. The tall, black towers fill two large alcoves, and their cooling fans emit a serene, industrial hum as blue lights blink. …

J ust before dawn on Sept. 24, 2007, a red, white, and blue Gulfstream II fell from the sky over the Yucatán Peninsula. The private jet had taken off without passengers from Rio Negro, Colombia, for Cancún, Mexico, more than 1,200 miles north, but crossed radar as a suspicious flight, …

R ight around noon on Oct. 10, 2019, just outside Pecos, Texas, in the Permian oil patch, Jeff Springman bends down to the desert floor, grabs some dirt, tosses it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. At this site there are a total of seven …

Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast on YouTube, is expanding his empire into reality television with Amazon. A creator and star of the largest channel on YouTube, with more than 310 million subscribers, Donaldson has built his audience with over-the-top challenges, such as staying in a nuclear bunker for 100 days …

M y initiation into the cannabis trade began in a middle school bathroom. Dime bags led to ounces, which led to pounds, and in my early twenties, my partner “SOME” and I were doing Canadian border crossings and road trips from Northern California to New York City, where we landed …

O ne day well into President George W. Bush’s second term, an ultra-deep-cover Central Intelligence Agency officer flew back to the United States for a break from a yearslong assignment in the Middle East. The man had a bushy beard and a distinctive, needled scar on one arm from an …