Longform

Notes on humiliation.

Stranded in Yemen’s war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If—or when—it explodes or sinks, thousands may die.

For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?

Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any.

At Moody Bible Institute, purity culture and complementarianism have worked together to forgive abusers and punish the abused.

After decades of mismanaging its nuclear waste, the US Department of Energy wrestles with its toxic legacy.

On the veracity of documentary filmmaking.

Fossils have become a hot new asset class. Paleontologists aren’t thrilled, but for Clayton Phipps and his peers, it’s a living.

Faced with fragility and uncertainty, gig workers around the world are connecting across borders to challenge platforms’ power and policies.

What happens when trying to escape poverty means separating from your family at 13?

German painting’s arch-traditionalist has a brush with controversy.

Inside a quirky indie publisher’s turn to Covid trutherism

Awash in coders, crypto, and capital, the city is loving—and beginning to shape—its newest industry.

The writer and his oldest friends reunited to mourn the ones they lost—and honor the time they have left.

“You have to ask for food. You have to ask to go use the bathroom. … [Kelly] is a master at mind control. … He is a puppet master.”

With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports.

In the West, organized extremists are driving community health officials out of their jobs.

The CIA plan to grab or kill Julian Assange before a theoretical escape to Moscow.

An interview with Amia Srinivasan.

To deal with climate change and power the cars of tomorrow, we’ll have to solve the cobalt problem.

The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.

The story of Theranos.

But there’s one way that NFTs are profoundly different from the last generation of online disrupters. In terms of ownership, they actually move in the opposite direction of projects like Napster, BitTorrent and the software communities that destabilized the entertainment industry. Those were about reproducing data and sharing it for free, or eventually, a subscription fee. NFTs are about taking what should be a fully shareable image and sticking a SOLD sign on it.

Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.