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- Cover Story
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780 Days of Solitude
One minute we were three tourists hiking up a pretty mountain trail. The next we were hostages headed for two years in hell.
- FEATURES
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Are Any Plastics Safe?
Inside the Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury the disturbing truth about the products you use every day.
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The Agony of Bobby Jindal
Can an exorcist-turned-governor win back the party faithful and capture the White House?
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What If Everything You Knew About Poverty Was Wrong?
Kathryn Edin revolutionized sociology with a radical idea about how to study poor people: Talk to them.
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This Is Your Wilderness on Drugs
The landscape-scarring, energy-sucking, animal-killing reality of American marijuana farming.
- OutFront
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Spy Camp
The Stasi’s secret styles
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How Conservatives Learned to Love Prison Reform
Red states go soft on the war on crime.
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What If Your Income Had Exploded Like the 1 Percent’s?
What if you’d gotten rich like the rich got richer?
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Go South, Old Man!
Ayn Rand’s Chilean colony
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Too Fast, Too Furious
Get ready for stronger hurricanes.
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Loaded Chambers
Lawmakers who shoot from the hip
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The Wolf of Your Street
Wall Street wants your rent check.
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Dancing With the Tsars
BeyoncĂ©’s dance with a dictator
- MIXED MEDIA
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The Brains of the Operation
Inside the brain of The Walking Dead‘s zombie genius
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Friends in High Places
Place hackers go there.
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“Dunkin’ Donuts Bullshit!”
Reggie Watts on marching to his own beatbox
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Yes, He’ll Marry You
Yes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt will marry you.
- FOOD + HEALTH
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Are Antibiotics Making Us Fat?
If the superbugs don’t kill you, maybe the poundage will.
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Let Them Eat Junk Food
Should Uncle Sam tell food stamp recipients what to buy?
Contributors
After living in Zuccotti Park with Occupy Wall Street, 1 Laura Gottesdiener spent two years reporting on the mortgage crisis (“The Wolf of Your Street“).
2 Mariah Blake (“Are Any Plastics Safe?”) fondly remembers pushing her infant brother around in her pink plastic Barbie motor home; photographer Evan Kafka wrangled his three-year-old son for the image.
3 Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal‘s article (“780 Days of Solitude“) is excerpted from A Sliver of Light, their new memoir chronicling their imprisonment in Iran; Owen Freeman has illustrated for The New Yorker, GQ, and many other publications.
To tell the coming-of-age story of Louisiana’s governor (“The Agony of Bobby Jindal“), 4 Tim Murphy spent hours closely reading back issues of obscure Catholic journals.
5 Mustafah Abdulaziz shot photos of sociologist Kathryn Edin (“What If Everything You Knew About Poverty Was Wrong?“) during a cold snap so bad it cracked his camera.
While visiting the remnants of a marijuana farm busted by forest rangers, Josh Harkinson resisted the temptation to pluck the buds off a plant they’d missed (“This Is Your Wilderness on Drugs“); illustrator 6 Gina Triplett was raised in rural Minnesota, where most farmers grew corn—and, if they were feeling really wild, maybe some soy.