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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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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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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"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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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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The Prism
An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government was opening his mail. Mazzini,…
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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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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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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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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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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…
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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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The Gift of Doubt
In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and…
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Contest of Words
Although high school debate is often considered the thinking person’s—the nerd’s—alternative to sports, my memories of it are primarily somatic: the starched collar of the…
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Intricate family connections bind several of…
BY KRIS HUNDLEY AND KENDALL TAGGART Times/CIR special report Carol Smith still gets angry when she remembers the box that arrived by mail for her dying husband. Cancer Fund of America sent it when he…
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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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Chemically Burned: Dow Chemical Tries to Avoid…
His skin was on fire. Brian Johns couldn't feel exactly what was happening to him through the jolt of endorphins and adrenaline pumping through his body, but the acid was still there, sizzling…
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Secret to Prism success: Even bigger data seizure
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on…
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The Rules of Grieving: They are still boys
Phillip Bryant has only one memory of his mother and it feels like a dream. It is the morning and he is 4 years old and he is standing next to her bed. He is wearing pajamas and he is shaking her…