Longform

The inside story of Target’s brief, disastrous expansion north.

A profile of the Carolina Panthers quarterback, this season’s likely MVP.

“This is a story about an entertainer named R. Kelly. It is a story about the remarkable, but also very strange, pop talent he has. It is a story about the difficult places he came from and the ways they may, or may not, have shaped who he has become. It is also the story of a man who has been publicly accused of multiple sexual offenses with underage women, and who stood trial for making child pornography. He was eventually acquitted of that charge, and his career has continued uninterrupted, but for the most part he has evaded even the most basic questions that might help people understand what is true about him. For this story, R. Kelly agreed to speak about his whole life without restrictions.”

“They played a game of chess with our lives and we lost.”

An excerpt from LaValle's novel about a black man in a Lovecraftian universe.

The final days of the last Navy SEAL to die in Afghanistan.

A small-town coffeeshop owner led a double life as a blogger and podcaster on the topic of “pickup artistry.” Then his identity, and his intimate writings about his experiences with 46 local women, was made public.

After his daughter died in a terrorist attack, Stephen Flatow won an unprecedented judgment against her killers. Then he had to figure out how to actually collect.

A traveler tries to make sense of a beautiful island with a dark past.

On the talent, ego, and late father of Bryant Gumbel.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy working for British intelligence, was poisoned. As he lay dying, he worked with detectives to find his killer.

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.”

Behind the character Ursula in The Little Mermaid was a legendary drag queen from Baltimore named Divine.

A bicycling love story.

Chris Earnshaw began taking photographs of Washington, D.C. more than 40 years ago. By the time he paid a visit to a museum to tout his work, he had in his possession—in plastic bags and filing drawers—3,000 Polaroids of a city long gone.

The city of Cleveland is on the hook $18.7 million in judgements for police brutality. They have a plan to get out of paying. And if it works, cities across the country could starting using the same maneuver.

How a woman whose muscles disappeared discovered she shared a disease with a muscle-bound Olympic medalist.

An essay on depression, art, and growing up.

Letters from a jailed French jihadi.

How women in the L.A. comedy scene, long pressured to stay quiet about sexual abuse and harassment for the sake of their careers, began to fight back.

How a hanger-on at the fringe of San Francisco’s rock scene built the Rolling Stone empire.