Longreads

In this excerpt from Braking Bad, about disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong and the greatest doping conspiracy in sports history, we ask what kind of man is best fit to excel at the Tour de France?

Ebola is nightmare fuel: a biological doomsday device conspiring with our bodies to murder us in uniquely gruesome fashion. It’s also killed fewer than 2,000 people. How has a virus with such a modest body count so fiercely captured the darkest corners of our imagination?

In the aftermath of rape, and throughout the two-year-long rape trial, I was obsessed with dangerous animals. This is how I went from prey to predator.

This spring, three blue whale carcasses washed up on the Newfoundland shore, spurring a panic about whale explosions. These fears, while unfounded, were indicative of something much worse—and marked a new, ominous chapter in the whale’s evolving symbolic import.

How did the restaurant kitchen become the frantic, sweltering, tyrannical hellhole it is today? A history of the back-of-the-house and its rigorous hierarchies.

A dubious, obsessive attempt to understand the work of the playwright/director behind Neutral Hero, Isolde, and Burger King.

The complex web of deceit that was the Iran-Contra affair is now mostly forgotten, subsumed by Ronald Reagan’s reputation as a conservative hero. But the CIA’s interference in Nicaragua is impossible to ignore, even if the remnants of it whither away.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, a Hutu from Burundi shares his story of surviving President Paul Kagame’s alleged secret war of vengeance, one obscured by the fight to overthrow Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Ryan Freel’s 2012 suicide shed light on the rarely mentioned issue of mental health in baseball. Dirk Hayhurst’s new book goes even further, chronicling his own struggles in the majors, and the culture that tries to keep those kinds of discussions quiet.