Edward Conard is Mitt Romney’s former partner at Bain, and he’s not afraid to have an honest conversation about wealth: 

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. ‘What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure those guys are college-educated.’

“The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy.” — Adam Davidson, New York Times

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How young Colton Burpo’s visit to Heaven became a word-of-mouth best seller, and what it means to a writer raised fundamentalist:

When I was not quite 4 — about the same age as Colton Burpo — my own newly born-again parents sat me down to impart the good news about Jesus, the son of God, who was born in a manger surrounded by sheep and donkeys and ended up being nailed to a cross on a hill and dying there. On the third day, he rose from the grave (you could tell it was he from the nail holes), and he did all of this to pay for my sins. If I accepted him into my heart, I would be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. Otherwise, I would burn eternally with the Devil in hell. So we needed, urgently, to pray.

‘Right now?’ I said, or something like that. I remember not feeling 100 percent ready to ask this undead man, with his holey extremities, to dwell inside me.

“My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller.” — Maud Newton, New York Times

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A new chemical endangerment law in Alabama, originally designed to protect children from meth labs, is now being used to prosecute mothers who used drugs during their pregnancy:

Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has drafted ‘friend of the court’ briefs for Kimbrough signed by groups like the National Organization for Women-Alabama and the American Medical Association. She argues that applying Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law to pregnant women ‘violates constitutional guarantees of liberty, privacy, equality, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.’ In effect, she says, under Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law, pregnant women have become ‘a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen.’ And, she says, the law violates pregnant women’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the law. Ketteringham also recruited two prominent Alabama lawyers, Jake Watson and Brian M. White, to take Kimbrough’s case pro bono. ‘I love babies, too, but I don’t like locking up their mamas,’ Watson told me.

“The Criminalization of Bad Mothers.” — Ada Calhoun, New York Times Magazine

See also: “A Young, Cold Heart.” — Tom Robbins, New York Times, Jan. 14, 2012

How psychedelic drugs are helping terminally ill patients face death:

Norbert Litzinger, [Pam] Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still be alive at that time — a concert, dinner with friends; would she still be here for that?” When came to claim the couple’s life completely, their anxiety building as they waited for the final day.

As her fears intensified, Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.

“How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death.” — Lauren Slater, New York Times Magazine

A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy?

I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few years. I went back for the trial in 1998 because, let’s face it, it’s not often that someone in your family becomes the focus of a sensational murder case, on the local news for weeks at a time, the circumstances of her demise so tawdry and bizarre that the story appeared in People magazine, on ‘Hard Copy’ and, eventually, on the guilty-pleasure pinnacle of true-crime cable-TV programs, ‘City Confidential.’ And there was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate. She’d always been kind of coldhearted. It was not an unfitting end.

“How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze.” — Joe Rhodes, The New York Times

See also: “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist.” — Wired, Dec. 27, 2010

As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ:

Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason ‘The Passage of Power’ took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing ‘Master of the Senate.’ (He also thought he could finish ‘The Power Broker’ in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: ‘Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.’ Gottlieb added, ‘The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.’

“Robert Caro’s Big Dig.” — Charles McGrath, New York Times

See also: “Hatching Monsters: Lessons in Fame from P.T. Barnum’s Autobiography.” — Charles Baxter, Lapham’s Quarterly

Inside the rock star’s Nashville home and the headquarters for his growing company, Third Man Records: 

White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing the master recordings of nearly every song he’s ever been involved with. Unusually for a musician, White has maintained control of his own masters, granting him extraordinary artistic freedom as well as truckloads of money. ‘It’s good to finally have them in a nice sealed environment,’ White said. I asked where they’d been before, and he laughed. ‘In a closet in my house. Ready to be set on fire.’

White said the building used to be a candy factory, but I had my doubts. He’s notoriously bendy with the truth — most famously his claim that his White Stripes bandmate, Meg White, was his sister, when in fact she was his wife. Considering the White Stripes named themselves for peppermint candies, the whole thing seemed a little neat. ‘That’s what they told me,’ he insisted, not quite convincingly. I asked if I needed to worry about him embellishing details like that, and he cackled in delight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

“Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time.” — Josh Eells, New York Times Magazine

See also: “The Fresh Air Interview: Jay-Z.” Terry Gross, Nov. 16, 2010

The Game of Thrones star’s long path to stardom—and the choices he made to reject stereotypical roles for dwarves:

I read about him online the day before the Globes. It really made me sad. I don’t know why.’ He corrected himself: ‘I mean, I know why: it’s terrible.’ In October, Henderson, who is 37 and is 4-foot-2, was picked up and thrown by an unknown assailant in Somerset, England. He suffered partial paralysis and now requires a walker. The night of the Globes, after Dinklage’s mention, Henderson’s name was a trending topic on Twitter. Dinklage later turned down offers to discuss the case with Anderson Cooper and other news hosts.

‘People are all, like, I dedicated it to him,’ he said. ‘They’ve made it more romantic than it actually was. I just wanted to go, “This is screwed up.” Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice. Not just by people who’ve had too much to drink in England and want to throw a person. But by media, everything.’ He sipped his coffee and pointed out that media portrayal is, in part, the fault of actors who are dwarves. ‘You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule.’

“Peter Dinklage Was Smart to Say No.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine

See also: “The Secret Drew Barrymore.” — Todd Gold, People Magazine, Jan. 16, 1989

In situations where girls are showing signs of puberty as early as age 6, should parents fight it with drug treatments, or figure out ways for their child to accept what is happening?

‘I would have a long conversation with her family, show them all the data,’ Greenspan continues. Once she has gone through what she calls ‘the proc­ess of normalizing’ — a process intended to replace anxiety with statistics — she has rarely had a family continue to insist on puberty-arresting drugs. Indeed, most parents learn to cope with the changes and help their daughters adjust too. One mother described for me buying a drawer full of football shirts, at her third-grade daughter’s request, to hide her maturing body. Another reminded her daughter that it’s O.K. to act her age. ‘It’s like when you have a really big toddler and people expect the kid to talk in full sentences. People look at my daughter and say, “Look at those cheekbones!” We have to remind her: “You may look 12, but you’re 9. It’s O.K. to lose your cool and stomp your feet.”’

“Puberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?” — Elizabeth Weil, New York Times Magazine

See also: “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” — Lori Gottlieb, The Atlantic,  June 13, 2011

A blow-by-blow account of a political negotiation gone wrong. President Obama and Republican House speaker John Boehner came close to a deal last July that would cut federal spending and bring in billions in new revenue. But a series of missteps led to its demise:

From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he came away feeling Obama betrayed him. ‘He had to have known that this was going to set my hair on fire,’ Boehner told me when we sat together in his office on the first day of March. He was seated in a leather chair by a marble fireplace, his cigarette smoldering in an ashtray at his side. Three aides sat nearby.

‘You have to understand,’ he went on, ‘there were hours and hours of conversation, and he would tell me more about my political situation than I ever would think about it, all right? So when you come in and all of a sudden you want $400 billion more — he had to have known!’ Boehner shook his head, as if he was still puzzled by it all.

“Obama vs. Boehner: Who Killed the Debt Deal?” — Matt Bai, The New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Matt Bai