Tony Horwitz – Spying on The South

In the early 1850s, as America slid towards civil war, a young reporter for what was then the New-York Daily Times journeyed through the slave states. He hoped to gain a “reliable understanding of the sentiments and hopes & fears” among their people, and “promote the mutual acquaintance of the North and South”. What he saw of […]

Dangerous Animals

One day in September last year, John Kartsounis was gazing down from a plane window at Cape Cod, the sandy peninsula that juts from the state of Massachusetts into the North Atlantic in the shape of a clenched arm. It was a clear day, and he thought he could make out the public beach where […]

Down the Road from Charlottesville

As a young boy, he would go into the woods to hunt squirrels and rabbits with pellet guns. He would fish in a river right next to the family home. His father wasn’t an especially passionate hunter, but they would go together once a year, in deer season. “I grew up in nature,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted my own kids to grow up with acreage around them.” […]

The Dead Pimp, and Other Lessons

Dennis Hof was no run-of-the-mill pimp. He had starred in Cathouse, an HBO reality series set in one of his brothels, and authored a memoir, The Art of the Pimp. He was also the subject of rape allegations by multiple former employees. But Chuck Muth had realised the obvious: that, in the age of Trump, rape allegations against a famous TV pimp could be dismissed […]

Trump Rides West

On September 6th last year, President Donald Trump kicked off the autumn campaign season with a rally in Billings, Montana. He’d campaigned throughout the spring, and almost non-stop over the summer as well – indeed, he’d never really stopped campaigning since his own election victory – but now the primaries were over and the country was […]

The Torturer

CO-WRITTEN WITH JULIANO FIORI People say that this guy isn’t a concrete threat, said “Raíssa Leal, a 25-year-old student, as she left another event and headed home to her favela community in Jacarepaguá. “But his supporters are.” Indianara Siqueira, a veteran transgender rights activist attending a recent protest, reeled off a list of incidents she’d […]

Sly Jazz

The National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, in Upstate New York, lays out the sport’s history like an allegory of the long American century, its tragedies and glories. A gallery with the feel of a mausoleum enshrines the finest 1 per cent of players. They came from farms and small towns and urban slums, […]