Longform

On the fleeting magic of volleyball.

How a card-counting former meteorologist from Las Vegas made the first perfect Showcase bid in the 38-year history of The Price Is Right.

On what lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and what lies ahead.

The story of 1982’s Making Love.

A eulogy for a movement.

"The honesty in Perfume Genius’s music has attracted him a devoted audience, and he receives a lot of messages on Twitter from young kids going through the process of coming out, or dealing with their own addictions. “I think people come to my music just to feel less lonely,” he says. “When I write, sometimes I think, What would I have liked to have heard when I was younger?” But on his new record, out this May, he aimed for something a little more developed: essentially, he wanted to make a grown-up album about life after you’ve trudged through the trauma."

A father tries to bond with his transgender child.

A profile of Candy Barr—porn star pioneer, burlesque legend, Texas folk hero.

The many myths of Vladimir Putin.

"These young men seem to have no conception of the consequences of allying yourself publicly with the far right, even before their hero gets accused of endorsing pedophilia in public. Yiannopoulos has been good to them. They’re having a great time. Over the course of a few hours, I find myself playing an awkward Wendy to these lackluster lost boys as I watch them wrestle with the moral challenge of actually goddamn growing up."

Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, who left Pro-Choice activism for born-again Christianity and a strange life of financial opportunism, died this week.

Watching the most famous frames in history with Errol Morris.

In 2001, Jill Wells’ 6-year-old son accidentally shot and killed her on a remote ranch in Colorado. Or at least that’s what her husband told authorities.

" I really think that for us, who all grew up listening primarily to recorded music, we tend to forget that until about 120 years ago ephemeral experience was the only one people had. I remember reading about a huge fan of Beethoven who lived to the age of 86 [in the era before recordings], and the great triumph of his life was that he’d managed to hear the Fifth Symphony six times. That’s pretty amazing. They would have been spread over many years, so there would have been no way of reliably comparing those performances."

"4chan value system, like Trump’s ideology, is obsessed with masculine competition (and the subsequent humiliation when the competition is lost). Note the terms 4chan invented, now so popular among grade schoolers everywhere: “fail” and “win”, “alpha” males and “beta cucks”. This system is defined by its childlike innocence, that is to say, the inventor’s inexperience with any sort of “IRL” romantic interaction. And like Trump, since these men wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling these insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else. Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. "

An NHL goalie on playing with mental illness.

A husband puts himself in his wife’s shoes—with help from a Japanese scientist.

What does it mean to be polite anymore?

Meet the man responsible for third-wave coffee—and the Frappuccino.

A profile, months in the making, of now-former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context was a brilliant, scary vision of a cultural end-time. Then, having described it, he lived it, spiraling into madness.

Mapping the global spread of antigay ideology.

A profile of NASCAR Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is returning to racing after a series of concussions.

There are a thousand ways to buy weed in New York City, but the Green Angels devised a novel strategy for standing out: They hired models to be their dealers.