Longform

“The remains of a sunken village nearby make me realize that the process is inexorable. Of this seventy-five-house village, there is almost nothing left.”

In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.

On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.

Two men with the same name. A murder, a manhunt, and a chilling question: Did a Florida court hand down a life sentence because of a mistaken identity?

The trucker blew a stop sign and hit a bus full of teenagers. Now the families of the dead grapple with their capacity to forgive.

A profile of England’s pre-eminent scholar of race, culture, and nationalism.

On the rise and demise of the Segway.

Megan Lundstrom understands more than most the conditions that force women into dangerous situations—she also has the key to help them escape.

In 2003, a man robbed a bank with a bomb around his neck. It exploded shortly thereafter, taking his life and leaving authorities to try to figure out who had put it there.

How a landscape architect is enlisting nature to defend our coastal cities against climate change—and doing it on the cheap.

How did the most wanted man in America, the serial bomber behind the Atlanta Olympics explosion, survive for five years in the North Carolina woods? And was he helped?

How the Brazilian butt lift, one of the world’s most dangerous plastic surgery procedures, went mainstream.

Qaddafi’s son is alive. And he wants to take Libya back.

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water, and people.

Anthony Veasna So died unexpectedly last winter, before his debut book was released. Everyone remembers him differently.

There are many explanations for the rise in killings in U.S. cities, including the pandemic and the choices made in response to it. In Philadelphia, the causes, the human costs — and the suffering — are particularly stark.

For 50 years, Enthusiastic Sobriety programs have promised to help teenagers kick drug and alcohol addiction. But former followers say ES doesn’t save lives—it destroys them.

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

A closer look at the economics of Black pop culture reveals that most Black creators (outside music) come from middle-to-upper middle class backgrounds, while the Black poor are written about but rarely get the chance to speak for themselves.

A respected professor shot dead through the mansion window. A quaint New England town shaken to its core. One all-consuming obsession in Whip City.

Pedestrianism was a sport of epic rivalries, eyewatering salaries, feverish nationalism, eccentric personalities and six-day, 450-mile walks.

The industry that fights bed bugs is growing, but the only real winners are the pests themselves.

Smell is often dismissed as the least important sense. But it’s the funk that draws us together.

For decades, poppers have been the go-to sex drug for gay men. But where do they come from?