A writer investigates what it would be like if he never got married, had kids, or settled into a stable job. He decides to search for his carefree doppelgänger—a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field:

‘What time can I come by?’ I asked.

‘Oh, anytime. I’ll just be kicking it around the house.’

Kicking it. This is not a concept in our house. I drove out to the scruffy edge of southeastern Portland and pulled up to the place where my doppelgänger was staying, nervous about intruding. The house was everything I’d ever dreamed of—at least when I used to dream of such a life. There was a pile of construction lumber in the front yard, and the porch was covered in beer cans and Goodwill furniture and well-thumbed paperbacks, some of them as warped as giant clams.

“The Cooler Me.” — Eric Puchner, GQ

More from GQ

Forty years after hijacking a plane and then disappearing, George Wright is found:

On the afternoon of August 19, 1970, a couple of men approached Wright. Their names were Jimmy and Jumbo. Wright was working in the prison laundry at the time. The men said they’d had enough of prison and wanted to do something about it. ‘They asked me,’ says Wright, ‘if I was interested.’

‘You guys kidding me?’ said Wright.

‘No,’ they said.

‘Yeah,’ said Wright. ‘I’m interested.’ They talked about it. ‘I ain’t going nowhere walking,’ Wright added.

‘We’re going to get transportation,’ they said. Jimmy mentioned that he was a skilled mechanic, expert at hot-wiring cars.

Wright figured that if he did get out, he’d need cash to restart his life. There are always wheeler-dealers in prison who have money, and Wright knew one of them, a man named George Brown, who was serving three to five years for armed robbery. Brown promptly joined the team. They agreed that they were going all the way: Either they’d escape or they’d be shot. Freedom or death.

“Uncatchable.” — Michael Finkel, GQ

See more #longreads by Finkel

“If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then [Eric] Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.” Meet the former Boston Herald reporter-turned-consigliere to the presidential candidate: 

It was January of 2008, the last time Romney ran for president, and Fehrnstrom was getting in the face of an Associated Press reporter in a Staples store in South Carolina. The reporter, Glen Johnson, had just challenged Romney during a press conference, interrupting him in the middle of a claim that he didn’t have lobbyists working on his campaign—Mitt definitely did—and when the press conference was over, Romney rushed after Johnson to press his case. ‘Listen to my words, all right? Listen to my words,’ Romney sputtered, smiling through gritted teeth. That’s when Fehrnstrom stepped in and cornered Johnson in front of a Post-it notes display. ‘You should act a little bit more professionally instead of being argumentative with the candidate,’ he hissed at Johnson. ‘It’s out of line. You’re out of line.’

“Mitt Romney’s Dark Knight.” — Jason Zengerle, GQ

See more from Zengerle

Chris Chaney was a 33-year-old loner in Florida who decided to shake up his boredom by breaking into celebrities’ email accounts. Soon he discovered nude photos of Scarlett Johansson and other stars, and then the FBI came calling:

While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos of her client Christina Aguilera trying on outfits in a dressing room, wearing little more than silver pasties. Chaney found a random guy on a celebrity message board and sent him an e-mail telling him he knew ‘someone’ who had hacked pictures of Aguilera. Did he want to check them out?

Chaney freaked the moment he sent it. What the hell am I doing? he thought. He was using a phony e-mail address, but he didn’t know how to effectively cover his tracks. On December 8, a headline appeared on TMZ: ‘Christina Aguilera: My Private Sexy Pics Were Hacked.’ Aguilera’s rep told TMZ they were ‘attempting to determine the identity of the hackers and will pursue them aggressively.’

“The Man Who Hacked Hollywood.” — David Kushner, GQ

More Kushner: “The Hacker is Watching.” Jan. 15, 2012, GQ

A New Yorker with limited French skills gets dropped into an advertising agency in Paris: 

In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits.

It definitely wasn’t appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn’t. Young men generally didn’t kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored.

“An American (Working) in Paris.” — Rosecrans Baldwin, GQ

More Baldwin: “Writing Is My Peppermint-Flavored Heroin.” The Millions, March 12, 2010

A moment-by-moment reconstruction of last year’s U.S. embassy attack in Kabul:

In an image that remained strangely fixed in her mind afterward, Howell watched as he slowly peeled the skin off. As he was peeling off the very last bit, there came a heart-stopping screech and then the bang and shock of an impact. Something had just blown up in her waiting room, and though the thick glass had protected the office, they had all felt the concussion and could smell the acrid stench of burning.

“That was an RPG!” one of her Afghan colleagues said as they scrambled to their feet. All Howell could think of was the other recent attacks in Kabul, where explosions had been a prelude to armed strangers coming in on foot and slaughtering anyone they could find. She called out to see if everyone was all right and then told her staff to evacuate. As they were moving toward the door, security officers came through, shouting, “Let’s go, let’s go!”

Howell glanced back at the glass that looked out on the waiting room, where the little girl had been playing before. There was just an opaque wall of smoke.

“The Siege of September 13.” — Matthieu Aikins, GQ

More GQ: “The Boy from Gitmo.” — Michael Paterniti, Feb. 1, 2011

Sam Brown, a soldier badly burned in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, undergoes an experimental treatment to ease his pain through a virtual reality game called “SnowWorld”:

When they first lowered the goggles over his eyes, Brown was not all that impressed. He found himself floating through a kind of glacial canyon, but the overall vibe was pretty kiddie. Snowflakes wheeled gently from a digital sky. Snowmen and penguins lined up on ledges along the fjord. The soundtrack was kind of lame, too. Kind of an upbeat chirpy world music, a catchy-against-your-will kind of thing that he’d never heard before. If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your loo-ong lost pal, the lyrics went.

But there was no question Sam felt very much inside this Disneyesque world on ice, and it was a hell of a lot better than being present while they yanked and pulled at his petrified shoulders. So he tried to get into the game. A few milligrams of Dilaudid didn’t hurt.

“Burning Man.” — Jay Kirk, GQ

See also: “Soldiers Take One Step at a Time with Prosthetic Limbs.” — John Pekkanen, Washingtonian, Aug. 1, 2011

Thirty-two-year-old Luis Mijangos hacked into his victims’ computers, accessing their hard drives and even turning on their webcams:

Mijangos was an unlikely candidate for the world’s creepiest hacker. He lived at home with his mother, half brother, two sisters—one a schoolgirl, the other a housekeeper—and a perky gray poodle named Petra. It was a lively place, busy with family who gathered to watch soccer and to barbecue on the marigold-lined patio. Mijangos had a small bedroom in front, decorated in the red, white, and green of Mexican soccer souvenirs, along with a picture of Jesus. That’s where he spent most of his time, in front of his laptop—sitting in his wheelchair.

“The Hacker is Watching.” — David Kushner, GQ

See also: “Hacked!” — The Atlantic, Nov. 1, 2011

Three siblings—the two brothers, carpenters, and the sister, a stripper—rob a bank and lead police on a 15-state chase. But what motivated them to do it?

PASCO SIBLINGS SOUGHT IN SHOOTING ALSO WANTED IN GEORGIA BANK HEIST. By the evening of August 4, the FBI had issued a press release stating that the three Georgia bank robbers and the three Zephyrhills shooters were one and the same. The image of a gun-toting, bank-robbing trio of siblings hit reporters like a shot of Jack Daniel’s; it was exhilarating; it was old-school. DOUGHERTY GANG ON THE LAM! Lee-Grace made the biggest splash. ‘A gun-toting stripper—what’s not to like?’ asked one commenter. A series of X-rated photographs she had taken for some guys who ran an illegitimate poker club where she gave lap dances later found their way into the public domain, most likely with a price tag.

“The Whole True Story of the Dougherty Gang.” — Kathy Dobie, GQ

See also: ”The Perfect Mark.” — Mitchell Zuckoff, New Yorker, May 15, 2006

They landed in Memphis, Tennessee, and drove across the Mississippi River to West Memphis. A local reporter showed them around and explained the case in terms of certain guilt. So did everyone else they met. “Absolutely, without exception, every person we met: rotten teens,” Berlinger says. He and Sinofsky decided to embed themselves for the duration of the trials. They would film the families of the victims and the accused, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys, and they would film inside the courtroom. When it was all over, they expected to have footage they could sift and splice into a narrative of murderous, misbegotten youths. “A real-life River’s Edge,” Berlinger says now. “That’s the irony in this whole thing: We went down to do a story about rotten teens.”

That was not the point of the film they released three years later. Rather, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills is a chronicle of fear and hysteria in the aftermath of a terrible crime. But mainly it is about three innocent kids and the persecution of misfits masquerading as a prosecution.

“Three at Last!” — Sean Flynn, GQ

More from Flynn: “Boom.” GQ, July 2010