Longform

Memories and violence resurface at a high school reunion.

“We’re the fucking establishment now. You and I. We’re not…” the young red hat, encircled by his squad, pantomimed the old establishment with a swaying, limp-wristed dance. “We won. Fuck them.”

On the road with Billy Bob Thornton and his band The Boxmasters. Twenty years after Sling Blade all he wants to do is direct but “but none of those Hollywood assclowns will give him the keys anymore.”

Predicting the first 100 days.

“We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. It’s impossible not to—I mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldn’t write it. You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it.”

A journey through Venezuela, once the richest country in South America, but now collapsing under the weight of the world’s highest rates of inflation and violent crime.

For three days, thousands of uninsured Americans converge on the Wise County Fairgrounds for the largest pop-up clinic in the country.

The complicated relationship between Gawker founder Nick Denton and his arch-nemesis investorr Peter Thiel.

Undercover as a student at Phoenix University, the largest for-profit higher education company in the country and the second-largest enroller of students (behind the SUNY system), where only 12 percent of first-time students graduate and the ad budget accounts for 30 percent of overall spending.

How do we restore consensus in an age so divorced from fact?

In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently in a storm dumping a load of plastic floatee toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—to the open sea. This is their story.

Excerpted from Last Girl Before Freeway.

A former reality star's strength in the face of a Presidential candidate's comments.

An Ironman consists of a 2.4-mile swim, then a 112-mile bike ride and then a marathon. The Quintuple Anvil Triathlon is five Ironmans in a row.

He stole over $1 million in chips – then checked himself into casino’s hotel to live like a king.

A long stroll through a Staten Island cemetery leads to the story of the 19th-century free-black oystermen who settled Sandy Ground.

How an obsessive New Age hustler brought the sound of the ocean to millions of home stereos.

"His friends remembered when Richard became famous. It was the year the hippies came to San Francisco. Richard had published one novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, but it had sold miserably 743 copies and his publisher, Grove Press, had dropped its option on Trout Fishing in America."

The director of The Exorcist visits the Vatican’s 91-year-old in-house exorcist in Rome.

How Atlanta-born Davido, the son of a wealthy Nigerian businessman, hopes to break the international market with his brand of Nigerian pop.

“They have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left – from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism – as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties – the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates.”

The Southern Baptist church, which has its origins in a split over slavery, at an election-year crossroads.

A brief history of churchyards, cemeteries, and the ghosts that haunt them.

In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history.