Top Reads
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One
Every month, The Atavist publishes a new piece of longform journalism and delivers it directly to the web, your phone, your tablet, and anywhere else you like to read. Get 30% off when you use the promo code "longform" and subscribe today. On the bright afternoon of September 2, 2009, two men sat on a bench in Stockholm. One was medium height with a reddish-blond beard and sunglasses. He wore a gray suit with an open-collar shirt. The other, a squat man with dark hair and an olive complexion, had on a green military-style jacket. The bench was one of a…
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NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy…
He may be a four-star Army general, but Alexander more closely resembles a head librarian than George Patton. His face is anemic, his lips a neutral horizontal line. Bald halfway back, he has hair the color of strong tea that turns gray on the…
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Four Ways to Figure Out What You Really Want to…
We've all hit that point where we can't figure out exactly what we really want to do with our lives. It can come when you're 18 or when you're 50, and it's always a difficult process to work through.…
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SPEW
1. Thievery “Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!”-- Glen Bateman, in Stephen King’s The…
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Are coders worth it?
There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and…
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Our Orgastic Future
Precisely when the ancient primates who preceded us Homo sapiens actually turned the corner to become human is one of those running battles in anthropology. Theorists scrutinize the long arc of…
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The Long Con
The day Phil Ferguson killed Vern Cox, late spring was turning to summer in “The Big Empty,” an expanse of high desert in Eastern Oregon where the earth stretched lonesome and wide. By…
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Ghosts of the Rio Grande
The path across the border is littered with bodies. Bodies old and bodies young. Bodies known and bodies unknown. Bodies hidden, bodies buried, bodies lost, and bodies found. The stories of the dead…
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Marcus London Ain't Someone U Fuck With
Porn Parody Editor's Note: Leigh Cowart, NSFWCORP's sex and science editor, spent five days living with porn star Marcus London and his entourage before writing this remarkable profile, which first…
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Berkeley: What We Didn’t Know
Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 734 pp., $40.00 …
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Change the World
In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti. Apple Computer had incorporated the previous year,…
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London's Calling: Part Two
Porn Parody Previously: Marcus London Ain't Someone U Fuck With Sunday It's a little over a month later when I land in LAX for my week-long stay at Marcus' private ranch. The logistics have been…
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The Unraveling of Bo Xilai
When Wang Lijun fled for Chengdu, he evaded guards outside his door who, a few weeks earlier, would have bowed to his authority. He drove quietly out of a city full of policemen who once would have…
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"Weaponize the Media": An Anonymous Rapper's War…
One night this past December, sitting at his laptop in his bedroom in Winchester, Kentucky, Deric Lostutter donned a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, recently purchased on eBay. He turned on the camera of…
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Stevie Nicks, the Fairy Godmother of Rock
Look to the shawls; let them show you the way. All night you’ve been anticipating their arrival on the Fleetwood Mac stage: the witchy moment when Stevie Nicks, that blonde chanteuse,…
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iOS 7
Earlier this week, Apple announced and previewed iOS 7. As widely expected, it sports a new interface aesthetic characterised by strong, simple lines, areas filled with flat or gradient colours, and…
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America's 50 worst charities rake in nearly $1…
The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday. Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and…
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Modern Warfare
HOMEThe video-game industry is currently waiting with bated breath for the release of Titanfall, the new sci-fi shoot-’em-up project from developers Vincent Zampella and Jason West. The game,…
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Inside the Lawsuit-Filled Breakup of Video-Game…
The video-game industry is currently waiting with bated breath for the release of Titanfall, the new sci-fi shoot-’em-up project from developers Vincent Zampella and Jason West. The game,…
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How James Turrell Knocked the Art World Off Its…
At the Guggenheim, a Vision of Light: The creation of James Turrell’s major installation that will occupy the atrium of the Guggenheim starting June 21. It was a beautiful Thursday morning in…