William Langewiesche is known to readers of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair as a kind of Jack London figure, a writer of sturdy, authoritative tales of modern life at the moral, technological and geographic margins. Among his subjects have been … Read more
I remember first hearing Francisco Cantú’s story sometime last year, spooling out from my car speakers as I wound through mountain curves many hundreds of miles from the border he writes about. He was telling a story of his … Read more
If Dan Barry has a beat, it is humanity — humanity as it reckons with its triumphs and travesties, and, sometimes, its profound secrets. Why does Barry begin a story about a long-hidden trove of bones with a girl … Read more
“The Uncounted,” Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal’s exhaustively reported investigation into the scale of civilian casualties in the U.S.-led coalition’s fight against ISIS, begins, like many disaster narratives, with a banal domestic scene. But in this case, the humdrum … Read more
John McPhee’s great subject has always been work. From his first book, “A Sense of Where You Are,” which came out in 1965 and portrays basketball star and Rhodes Scholar Bill Bradley, to “Uncommon Carriers” (2006), with its truckers and … Read more
To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, … Read more
Whoever said “It is better to travel than to arrive” wasn’t sitting next to Sarah Lyall aboard American Airlines Flight 1886 en route from Iowa to Arizona at the moment she tried to open her single serving of yogurt. Read more
Numbers can tell a story, but they can also be relentlessly abstract. That was certainly the case for Ciudád Juárez, which over the course of four years faced a relentless wave of cartel violence. From 2008 to 2011, the Mexican … Read more
It’s hard, I know, to make a case for gonzo journalism in an age when reality is beset by exaggeration, even lies. And yet I’ve found myself drawn back to the work of Hunter S. Thompson, who had an uncanny … Read more
“In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.” — “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen, 1975. There’s trouble in the heartland these days over promises broken and hopes betrayed. Somewhere on that lonely stretch … Read more
