S ix months before that hearing, Sue Hobart took me on a tour of her former home on Blacksmith Shop Road, what she now calls her “toxic house.” The front door opened onto a nearly empty living room, with the exception of a wooden armoire in one corner and a ladder leaning against the wall. A large…

On April 17, the bill to expand background checks on gun buyers failed in the Senate, and the fatalistic shrugs in Washington were so numerous they were nearly audible. The legislation had been a modest bipartisan compromise, supported by 90 percent of the public and lobbied for hard by the…

In the past few years, I've bought eighty-one leather jackets. Dozens of boots and leather gloves. I've purchased pants that cost $5,000. I own a $22,000 coat. This winter I took a tour of Milan's Fashion Week (all expenses paid by Gucci, in appreciation of my many, many purchases), where I spent…

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some…

Meat substitution scandals are becoming more common: When researchers test meats, they often find unexpected things Tiny Desk Domination: How NPR Music took over the tastes of the tastefully plugged-in NPR filled a vacuum left by squeezed-out music coverage—and the result is more and more a genre…

Gérard de Villiers, the author of the best-selling S.A.S. espionage series. Denis Rouvre for The New York Times Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot…

Illustration by Matt Dorfman. Photograph by Jens Mortensen for The New York Times. In the summer of 2011, after I completed six years of graduate school and internship training and was about to start my psychotherapy practice, I sat down with my clinical supervisor in the Los Angeles office we’d be…

"There's that word again..." The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150 . Most of us do not have room in…

Longreads: From the #Longreads archive: "Generation Why?" Zadie Smith, @nybooks on Facebook (2010) http://t.co/tEZz3YAo v. @katherinemiller

Ester Dean, center, has written smash hooks for Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. Credit Illustration by Michael Gillette On a mild Monday afternoon in mid-January, Ester Dean, a songwriter and vocalist, arrived at Roc the Mic Studios, on West Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan, for the first of five days of…

October 29th, 2012 I was in college when I first encountered the work of Elizabeth Gilbert. I was trying to be a writer (full disclosure: I still am), and I’d given myself the assignment of reading one short story collection a week. I was very strict about it. Sometimes the books were chores to get…

First Person November 1, 2012 | by Elissa Bassist I moved to New York for graduate school. I was in my mid-twenties, and what do we do when we’re in our mid-twenties? We move to New York with very little money and very high hopes. Like many, I entered into the nexus of love and wealth and fame…

From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education Photo taken at UC Berkeley in February, by jankyHellface The California student movement has a slogan that goes, “Behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops.” And no one embodies that connection more than the Ronald Reagan of the…

Okay, this post is the last thrust in our trip down the proverbial rabbit-hole, which so far has looked at what the ego is , and how the late Douglas Harding can help us answer that big, big question — who are you, really? This is part one of a two-part post. I had no idea what I was getting into.…

Home Politics Kevin Drum Environment Tom Philpott Media and Culture Subscribe Donate Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons. We throw thousands of men in the hole for the books they read, the company they keep, the beliefs they hold. Here's why. Photograph by James…

ERIKA LARSEN/REDUX Elizabeth Ebaugh is finally comfortable visiting the bridge from which she was thrown 26 years ago. On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car…

When Marina Keegan died, tragically, at the age of twenty-two, in a car accident in May, she had just graduated from Yale University and was about to start a job on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. (She had interned in the magazine’s fiction department last summer.) She was also at the…

A wide-ranging debate on how to best teach writing begins here on Tuesday, September 25. In 2009, when Monica DiBella entered New Dorp, a notorious public high school on Staten Island, her academic future was cloudy. Monica had struggled to read in early childhood, and had repeated first grade.…

Photo: Photography by Zachary Scott/New York Magazine; Styling by Gillean McLeod; Prop Styling by Kendall Faeth; Hair by Carlos Ortiz for Shu Uemura Hair Products at Cloutier Remix; Makeup by Kayleen McAdams for Yves Saint Laurent at the Wall Group; Pink Dress by Lanvin and Courtesy of Barneys;…