Longform

“I learned about sex in a Laundromat. The setting wasn’t my idea. It was my mother’s who had brought me along on washday to break the news.”

Under mysterious circumstances, two sisters are abandoned on an island.

Dominick Dunne’s account of the trial of his daughter’s murderer.

In Cuba, hand-delivered hard drives bring the web into people’s homes.

An interview with the mind behind Star Trek.

The mysterious business interests trying to patent strains and turn their company into the Monsanto of legal marijuana.

Ellen Pao recounts her own lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

A history of the Village Voice.

What happened to film critic Armond White?

Noorullah Aminya was once a valuable ally to the American military. Then, with the Taliban going after his family, he attempted to defect and spent three years in federal detention. To be granted asylum, he needed to convince a judge that the Taliban rule Afghanistan in full. Which would mean America has lost the war.

Was President Trump’s richest adviser focussed on helping the country—or his own bottom line?

“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”

A reporter on her way out of India probes a case of a woman beaten to death by her husband in public.

An 11-hour conversation about “well, just about everything that’s ever been funny.”

A young, pregnant woman named Laci Peterson disappears, her husband begins to act strangely, and one of the largest media circuses in history descends on the sleepy community of Modesto, CA.

The dark, tangled truths coming to light thanks to subterranean cartography.

How a rugby legend came out.

The answer may lie with the country’s powerful security agencies.

An ode.

Kids say it’s fun to take cars. They brag to each other about how many they’ve stolen and the sleekest models they’ve sped away in. They say they are bored and that it’s easy, sharing videos of themselves driving at 120 miles per hour. They smile with key fobs, offering rides on Facebook. But all of the biggest car thieves had something to run from.

“I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous.”

An hour-by-hour account of last weekend in Charlottesville.

Inside a world where a user named Pizza can amass millions of followers, transform internet humor, get caught peddling diet pills in get-rich-quick schemes, and have her blog shut down—all before graduating high school.

The pros and cons of computerized boyfriend models.