Longform

How a tattooed video store clerk with a history of drinking and drug use ended up at an Islamic self-help class leading to the birth of ISIS.

Kaskade is a 44-year-old devout Mormon father of three who has never touched a drink. He makes over $500,000 a night as an EDM performer.

How English became the weirdest major language in modern use.

Paul Phua rose from a Borneo numbers runner to being the biggest bookmaker in the world. Then he found poker.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

A reckless billion-dollar industry that occasionally kills.

Michael Phelps returns to his Olympic training after a 45-day stint at The Meadows.

“Missy (Misdemeanor) Elliott, the twenty-five-year-old hip-hop performer who is energetically redefining the boundaries of rap music, is a singer, a songwriter, an arranger, a producer, and a talent scout. Six months ago, few people outside the music industry had heard of her; six months from now, it will be necessary to pretend that you’ve known about Missy Elliott for years.”

The ongoing question of forgiveness in Charleston, where Dylann Roof opened fire in a church on June 17th.

A story of high school, sexuality, and tagging; from Puerto del Sol's first online issue.

What happens when an impoverished island nation enters into a deal to sell its own citizenship in bulk.

Morcellation was supposed to make gynecological surgeries easier on women. Instead, is it killing them.

In 1993 a black teenager in London was randomly stabbed to death by a gang of white youths. Twenty years later, they would be at the center of the trial of the decade.

They were the New York crew that once pulled off the Lufthansa heist, one of the biggest thefts in American history and the basis for Goodfellas. Nearly 40 years later, most are dead. The survivors are old, broke, and snitching.

In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him—for 438 days.

Putin's daughter Katerina has been attending college under the surname Tikhonova and is one of the top "acrobatic rock'n'roll dance" competitors in the world.

She is the also the rumored spouse of the son of one of Russia's richest bankers. While Putin reported only $119,000 on last year's tax return, his daughter's fortune could now stretch into the billions.

How Raj Rajaratnam and a McKinsey chairman made millions off a maid.

The true love story of Peanuts.

On the history of political polls, which have become more influential and less reliable over time.

A second act for the former head of McSweeney’s.

After his father died in an Airbnb rental, the writer investigates what the company can do to improve safety.

A profile of the writer.

Neale McShane’s jurisdiction in the Australian Outback is roughly the size of the United Kingdom. He patrols it alone.

While on a string of tour dates opening for Radiohead, interaction between Mark Linkous’ antidepressants and the Rohypnol he took to sleep caused him to pass out. A hotel maid found him the next morning bent into a position where his legs had been cut off from circulation. When they untangled, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure.