Roc Morin
Breast Cancer Survivors Find the Michelangelo of Nipple Tattoos
For all of medicine's advances, the best option for areola reconstruction after surgery is tattooing. And in the field of cosmetic tattooing, Vinnie Myers's trompe-l'oeil "areola portraits," as he calls them, are widely regarded as the best that money...
Earthships: The Post-Apocalyptic Housing of Tomorrow, Today
Concern over environmental devastation in the early 70’s led Michael Reynolds to begin constructing the sustainable homes called "Earthships" out of scavenged materials such as cans, bottles, and tires packed with dirt in Tres Piedras, New Mexico...
A Poisoner’s Guide to Central Park
Within the confines of New York City’s Central Park, there exists enough poison to threaten the good times and good health of every jogger, Sunday picnicker, dog walker, and huddled lover. I headed down to the world's most famous park to catalog nature...
Stepping Lightly in Afghanistan’s Soviet Tank Graveyard
Afghanistan's Kabul Military Training Center, where the country's finest military cadets learn to disarm IEDs and handle machine guns, is also home to a massive jumble of wrecked military hardware rusting in the sun.
CSI Afghanistan: Solving Murders in a War Zone
The man’s headless body was found sprawled in the middle of a road with a note pinned to his chest that read: “Anyone who attends this man’s funeral can expect the same fate.” The case was sent to Afghanistan's first and only forensic investigations...
Reading Taliban Love Poems in an Afghan Prison
I jumped onto the tarmac, squinting through the heat blast. We had come to witness the successful, but rocky, passage of a NATO prison and military base into Afghan hands.
I Kayaked to New York City’s Abandoned North Brother Island
In a city crammed with 8 million people, North Brother Island has sat abandoned since the 1960s. It's about a thousand feet from the shores of the South Bronx, and over the centuries it's been home to quarantined smallpox victims and Typhoid Mary, NYC...
The Site of Hitler’s Suicide Is Now a Playground
By the afternoon of his suicide, Adolf Hitler hadn’t seen the sun in ten days. He had been living in a concrete bunker 28 feet below the ruins of Berlin for months. Sixty-eight years later, Berlin is almost unrecognizable, and a slide sits atop the...
Searching for Forrest Fenn's Gold
In 2010, cancer-stricken millionaire Forrest Fenn buried a chest containing three million dollars worth of treasure somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe. Clues to the chest’s whereabouts are hidden in the text of a memoir and poem he published...
3,500 Cops Who Want All Drugs to Be Legal
“Just so we’re clear,” began Peter Christ during our first phone conversation, “if you look in Webster’s Dictionary at the word hypocrite, you will see a picture of me. I believed that this drug war was a stupid fucking idea even before I became a cop.”
Nate Hill and Death Bear Revisited
“Treat that box of fish guts like a lady,” Nate Hill warned the festive crowd. The way he towered over everyone had me checking for a box under his feet. There wasn’t any. He’s just that tall. The 36-year-old NYC-based artist wore his trademark milkman...
Development’s Debris: China’s Secret Battlefields
China’s cities are strewn with hidden rubble fields, vast apocalyptic landscapes that terminate abruptly at the thresholds of bustling neighborhoods. The skeletons of houses show what once existed there. Onlookers say it resembles the aftermath of a...