Longform

On the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, women express themselves through fierce short poems.

Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Texas headquarters of Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, so he started stealing — and got a little carried away.

The real journalists who inspired the movie look back on their investigation.

A car race goes tragically wrong.

She was a young plutonium worker whose Honda Civic Hatchback ran off the road and smashed into the wall of a concrete culvert. In her trunk were manila folders full of documents, which immediately went missing.

On the quarterback everyone loves to hate.

How PCC, once an inmate soccer team and now Brazil’s most notorious prison gang, coordinated seven days of riots throughout São Paulo using mobile phones.

On Dec. 18, 2007, the school board in Pinellas Country, Florida, voted to abandon integration. They justified the decision with bold promises: Schools in poor, black neighborhoods would get more money, more staff, more resources. They delivered none of that. A 5-part investigation.

What it’s like to drive tourists around the Australian outback.

The whole thing began over a puddle in the driveway. Eight years later, Peter Nygard and his neighbor Louis Bacon, who own houses next to each other in paradise, have spent tens of millions in a constantly escalating legal war. Neither man spends much time on the island anymore.

When James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, he left behind a fortune worth tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars. The problem is, he also left behind fourteen children, sixteen grandchildren, eight mothers of his children, several mistresses, thirty lawyers, a former manager, an aging dancer, a longtime valet, and a sister who’s really not a sister but calls herself the Godsister of Soul anyway.

Bobby Fischer unravels before the 1972 World Chess Championships, a.k.a. the “Match of the Century.”

On feminism and the limitations of outrage online.

Checking up on an ambitious, controversial conservation initiative, 20 years later.

An investigation of the infamous alleged assault.

Angie Nwandu has no journalism experience. No publishing experience. She’s 25. And in less than two years she has created an entirely new way to cover — and profit from — celebrity gossip.

Brian Chavez was supposed to be the one who made it out of Odessa. It didn’t turn out that way.

Searching for a ghost of Meyer Lansky’s Cuba, a sex-show star who quietly disappeared from the island and was later immortalized in The Godfather Part II.

Inside “a surreal world of pseudo-scientific methods and jargon, traumatizing psychodramas and nude cuddling with counselors.”

Life as the most famous children’s musician on earth.

The making of the drone.

“You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”

Since the Syrian rebel leader Hassan Aboud joined ISIS, taking with him fighters and weapons, he has been behind a sprawling mix of battlefield action and crime.

The bribery scandal, involving tests given for coveted government jobs and medical school admissions, began implicating high-ranking officials. Then people started turning up dead.