Longform

“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”

On the longstanding human fascination with a light source we could borrow but not share.

“It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical.”

Fifty years ago, Rona Barrett forged a Hollywood gossip empire. Then she left it all behind, her innovations attributed to others, her legacy almost entirely overlooked.

A visit to the American base in Antarctica, an “open-air museum of prefabricated regret.”

Over a million people are buried in a potter’s field on Hart Island. Here are some of their stories.

A pro-Ukraine activist goes silent in separatist-held Donetsk. A foreign correspondent goes looking for him.

The social network positioned its plan to bring the internet to millions of Indians as a gift. The country saw a catch.

In 2001, Maksym Igor Popov defected to work as an informant in the U.S. But a decade later, he was back to scamming the FBI.

“Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.’ And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.”

The number one place Tampa Bay cops visit: Walmart. And it’s not even close — they average two trips an hour.

Who authorized the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, and why?

A 6-part investigation of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

Thanks to a single court case, the state of Maryland is releasing almost 150 violent offenders who believed they would spend their life behind bars.

A profile of the man who helped invent the modern art of presidential spin and came to embody the blurry line between journalist and government official.

Scenes from a class conflict playing out between millionaires and billionaires on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Unspoken issues grip a couple's dinner along the Mississippi River.

The road to Lhakpa Sherpa’s seventh potential summit​ has been nothing if not complicated.

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

What happened to the Afghan timber worker after a 2005 battle was made into a book and feature film.

An Indian boy ran 40 miles at age 4. Fame followed—and a custody battle.

Searching for the source of British Columbia’s grim flotsam.

Ex-members say it’s a cult preying on young creative women in New York. Its leader — a man who goes by International Scherick, compares himself to Jesus, and charges $200 minimum — says he’s empowering his clients to be successful in life and love.