Longform

“Do you think you’re talking to a normal person here?”

On the eve of the Civil War, a nightmare at sea turned into one of the greatest rescues in maritime history. More than a century later, a rookie treasure hunter went looking for the lost ship—and found a different kind of ruin.

Mince pie was once more American than the apple variety. It was also blamed for “bad health, murderous dreams, the downfall of Prohibition, and the decline of the white race,” among other things. Then it disappeared.

Investigating a brutal double murder in a Kentucky military town.

The strange saga of Gordon Todd Skinner, a psychedelic aficionado and government informant who is now serving time in prison for kidnapping and torturing his wife’s teenage lover.

Wags Lending and the brave new world of of financing in “niches where we’re dealing with emotional borrowers.”

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

Why didn’t gay rights cure gay loneliness?

An oral history of SHU.

A near future with racial voting restrictions and questionnaires.

After oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world. Then they began to be murdered off mysteriously. In 1924 the nascent FBI sent a team of undercover agents, including a Native American, to the Osage reservation.

Computer scientist tycoon Robert Mercer is at the heart of a shockingly well-funded propaganda network.

The reclusive Swedish songwriting guru gives his first interview in 20 years.

“These, I now know, are the details of how my mother died..:”

Bill Ackman’s hedge fund planned to make a fortune while doing good by exposing Herbalife as a scheme that preyed upon and lied to the poor. How one of the highest profile stock shorts in market history went awry.

The rise and fall and rise again of a crooked televangelist.

On the decades-long quest for a zero-calorie sweetener.

The American medical experiment in Guatemala that left hundreds with STDs.

A profile of Beatty on the heels of Bonnie and Clyde.

A discovery in a Lithuanian forest brings a tale of survival back to life.

An interview with the duo behind Moonlight.

How Carl Foreman, while tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee, turned a throwaway Western into an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist.

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.

An immigrant on what happens when neighbors turn on each other:

"Every Bosnian I know had a friend, or even a family member, who flipped and betrayed the life they had shared until, in the early 1990s, the war started. My best high-school friend turned into a rabid Serbian nationalist and left his longtime girlfriend in Sarajevo so he could take part in its siege. My favorite literature professor became one of the main ideologues of Serbian fascism. Just last week, I talked to a Muslim man from Foča whose mother was repeatedly raped by his Serb friend, and whose brother was killed by their neighbor. Yugoslavia and Bosnia had provided a sense of societal stability for a couple of generations, which is why the betrayal was so shocking to so many of us."