Longform

A shipwreck, a mythical creature.

After Daniel Rigmaiden was arrested for a multi-million dollar fraud, he didn’t argue that he was innocent. He wasn’t. But he couldn’t understand how he had been caught. Rigmaiden had covered his tracks meticulously — the only way the cops could’ve found him, he realized, was through some secret tracking device that they had never disclosed to the public.

A sociologist’s controversial first book and the debate over who gets to speak for whom.

Looking for the ghosts of the Allman Brothers Band in Macon.

What seems like a slam-dunk case against a mass murderer exposes widespread prosecutorial misconduct in Orange County.

A report from the border of ISIS territory in Iraq, where civilians are battling to survive.

Nobody noticed Connie Converse when she was trying to get a record deal in New York in the 1950s. Nobody stopped her when she left her life in Michigan in 1974, never to be seen again. Today, her music is heard by tens of thousands.

On George Plimpton and the founders of The Paris Review.

A personal and legal history of assisted suicide.

Emily and Kate wanted to have a baby together. They were more successful than they ever imagined.

David Bowie interviewed by William S. Burroughs.

Rob Billot spent eight years defending corporate clients in environmental cases. Then Wilbur Tennant called.

“It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.”

A secret meeting, and short Q&A, with the drug lord while he was still on the lam.

Sitting alone in his San Jose office, Michael Burry saw the bubble in the subprime-mortgage market before anyone else. So he convinced Wall Street to let him bet on it, even though few were betting on him. The article that became The Big Short.

“Offhand, there are maybe three times in my life I can clearly recall laughing at something really terrible. One: when my mother told me my grandfather had a heart attack. Two: when a friend and I were driving to Cape Cod and a huge bird careened into the windshield, instantly bonking itself dead. Three: when my friends tried to keep me from going home from a party because they thought my boyfriend might kill me.”

“In this scene, set at a government dacha, they are joined by their American counterparts at the State Department for a daylong picnic that grows increasingly informal, involving drinks, flirtation, a guitar jam and (spoiler) contact between two spies. At times in my new job, I feel like a spy myself, and one with a shaky cover. I don’t have a good answer for how I got here.”

Why last night’s chicken made you sick.

Last February, John Jonchuck Jr. dropped his 5-year-old daughter off a bridge to her death. This is the story of what happened, and what didn’t, in the years before the murder made headlines.

The Castro, 1990, and a first night in drag.

After Brooke Melton died in a car crash, her parents approached attorney Lance Cooper to investigate. What he found in her 2005 Chevy Cobalt would lead to GM’s 30 million-vehicle recall.

College friends come together during a power failure and the onset of an ill-fated relationship.