Longform

Billy Mitchell’s quest for video game perfection.

On the science of touch.

“One afternoon about three days ago the Editorial Enforcement Detail from the Rolling Stone office showed up at my door, with no warning, and loaded about 40 pounds of supplies into the room: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, and enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls. There was also a big Selectric typewriter, two reams of paper, a face-cord of oak firewood and three tape recorders – in case the situation got so desperate that I might finally have to resort to verbal composition.”

An investigation into sexual abuse at elite New England schools.

How detox teas laced with laxatives took over Instagram.

Medicine, the company says, can also be a tasty snack.

Their entire lives, Alex and Tim Foley thought their mom and dad were typical, boring American parents. Then the FBI showed up.

On the rise of Marine Le Pen, France’s right-wing presidential candidate.

Digging into the misconceptions and silences surrounding pregnancy loss, which is more common than people believe.

Of the 4.5 million Syrians who have fled their nation’s bloody civil war, fewer than 3,000 have made it to America. This is one family’s story.

In the basement of the White House, in an office with no windows, an MFA grad named Ben Rhodes is telling the story of America’s foreign policy.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Purdue Pharma’s marketing materials say OxyContin works for 12 hours. It doesn’t. And this problem, long-denied by the drugmaker, is what makes it highly addictive.

Trump’s key adviser is a lobbyist known for reinventing tyrants.

The story of the landmark musical’s improbable success.

A backyard wrestling match; an examination of different young lives.

All aboard the maiden voyage Rob Gronkowski’s party cruise.

On settling in Los Angeles after life as a war correspondent in the Middle East.

Four men stood on the edge of the Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission, threatening to jump in protest. They referred to themselves as “China’s 21st century eunuchs,” damaged by medically-dubious surgeries.

Treasure hunters still scour Lower Silesia in search of legendary wartime riches.

An oral history of Aaliyah.

What increased tourism means for the people of the Northwest Passage.

A central Massachusetts city enabled the author’s ancestors to move into the good life of the middle class. That move is more complicated today.

A single pill could take the sting out of our memories of trauma.