Snake oil Modern snake oil salesmen In February 2008, "out of the blue," Joseph got a call from a salesman that identified himself as Ron Martino from PushTraffic, with a work from home opportunity.…

Chapel Hill, N.C. — Last year, by then under criminal indictment, John Edwards sat with a longtime friend in the 10,000-square-foot house that is the centerpiece of his 102-acre Chapel Hill…

Top row: Dorothy Parker, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson, Gael Greene. Bottom row: Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Tama Janowitz, Kate Christensen. In 1967, Patti Smith wrote in Just Kids, she was…

Judith Regan's never-aired Fox interview with O. J. Simpson. For Regan, an O.J. confession was plausibly a way back into Murdoch's tabloid heart. Photograph by Michael Yarish/Corbis. Somehow Judith…

James Erwin, 37, works for a financial services firm in Des Moines, Iowa, writing software manuals. He’s been doing that for a couple of years, and he enjoys it. It’s a pretty low-stress…

Since that controversial last episode of The Sopranos, in June 2007, the cast and crew have never spoken so candidly about the show that changed both their lives and the showbiz landscape. With…

“We have snakes,” Mary Brock said. “Long, thick snakes. Kingsnakes, rattlesnakes.” Brock was walking Pee Wee, a small, high-strung West Highland terrier who darted into the…

Halfway through my pregnancy, I learned that my baby was ill. Profoundly so. My doctor gave us the news kindly, but still, my husband and I weren’t prepared. Just a few minutes earlier,…

Before they went off to fight in Afghanistan, the guys of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines talked quietly about their deepest fear. Not dying. Not losing a leg or an arm. It was having their genitals…

Marion Barry has been sitting in his car for 25 minutes, waiting for people to show up to his campaign kickoff rally. It’s a warm, sunny February day. The greatest politician in the history of…

"This is not a publicity stunt," Erin Brockovich-Ellis informs the crowd gathered at the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel. "This is not about making another movie." It's March, and the famous…

I took the SAT a grand total of one time when I was in dipshit prep school. This was 1993. Like any other kid, I wanted to do well on the test, primarily so that I would NEVER have to take it again,…

Dharun Ravi grew up in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in a large, modern house with wide expanses of wood flooring and a swimming pool out back. Assertive and athletic, he used…

In the days after the June 2009 wedding party that took place at the 284-acre Sarsden estate, 75 miles northwest of London in the Oxfordshire countryside, it would be noted by the British press how…

Last summer, in Detroit s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in…

Editor's note: Read Part 1 of this story, which describes the 1970 slaying of Joe Henson, the fight that preceded it, and the police investigation. Jeff Blackburn is a balding, blue-eyed,…

Editor's note: Read Part 2 of this story, which describes A missing gun, a wavering prosecution, and decades of regret. Jo Ann Henson has always wanted to know more about how and why her father was…

Andrew Gardikis is a 17-year-old kid from Quincy with a shaggy mop of dirty blond hair and a long, lanky frame that he's still growing into. In the video game world, Gardikis is famous for being one…

Despite The Washington Post’s history of swashbuckling journalism, its business strategy has been deeply conservative. Can the heirs to Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee’s…

ST. LOUIS • The police captain couldn't believe it. He had the Knockout King in his office. It was September 2011, and police were struggling to get a handle on a series of vicious knockout…

Timothy Treadwell ---- Grizzly Man I am assuming that people reading my thoughts about Timothy Treadwell already have some understanding of the story. It would take another book to explain…

It's inevitable that this would happen. Now that I'm working with bears, the subject of Timothy Treadwell comes up almost on a daily basis, either when people ask my opinion of him, or -…

Animals have a right to live. We don’t like bears attacking us, so why do people provoke them? Why don’t people leave them alone in their own space? Some bears in conservation areas are…

He lived way out here, where it was just him and Alaska and to hell with everyone else. Here he was alone but never lonely, didn’t even know what loneliness was. Soon everyone would be gone…

Congratulations! Your Readability account has been created. You’re moments away from saving anything you find on the web to your iPad for reading on your terms—anytime, anywhere. If you…

Congratulations! Your Readability account has been created. You’re moments away from saving anything you find on the web to your iPhone for reading on your terms—anytime, anywhere. If…

After renting an $18 million estate in the emerald hills of Coatesville, New Zealand, Kim Dotcom e-mailed his neighbors. The mastermind of Megaupload, one of the world’s most popular…

Spy novels embrace clichés—the double agent, the bomb-rigged briefcase—and “Assassin of Secrets,” published last fall, made a virtue of this tendency, piling one trope…

The British journalist Sam Leith recently opened a review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: The Biography with the following question: “Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders?…

How I used CouchSurfing.org to crash with perfect strangers and see the country on the cheap (without getting killed by an ax murderer). By Tim Murphy on Fri. February 17, 2012 3:00 AM PDT…

Ricky in his $7-per-night tent in September: "Sometimes it hits me," he says, "that what I've spent my whole life doing, I'm not doing anymore." Originally published in the December 2004 issue Ricky…

It's been a big week for Cee Lo Green. On Sunday, the singer performed as a rather noticeable part of Madonna's sizable backup crew at the Super Bowl halftime show and, immediately after the game,…

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer. Unanswerable Prayers: What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers (including prominent rabbis and priests) are praying for his survival and salvation—while others believe his cancer was divinely inspired, and hope that he burns in hell? Unspoken Truths: Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice,” or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle. R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

Published August 26, 2011 By Andy Dehnart/Illustration by Cristela Tschumy
From the first days of reality TV—­narrative, character-driven storytelling that uses real people and real lives as its subject…

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