Longform

For decades, airlines failed to turn a profit despite having a monopoly on the sky. This year they’re expected to make billions. Here’s why.

On May 12, 2014, Nicole Holder told Charlotte police that she had been assaulted by Greg Hardy. He was arrested, charged, and convicted. Then the case was dismissed on appeal. After a season out of the league, Hardy is playing for the Dallas Cowboys. Owner Jerry Jones has called him a “real leader.”

This is the story, and the photos, of what happened that night.

How a Guatemalan cook ended up the master of okonomiyaki.

The daily life and dwindling hopes of a 12-year-old Syrian refugee.

The 79-year-old actor, too creaky to get off the couch, interviewed at his palatial Florida mansion about love, fame, and how he’s in okay financial shape despite the fact that a surveyor is taking measurements of his house as he speaks.

Shakiya Robertson thought she had found a way get her family a home. She moved in, fixed the place up, made all the payments. Then she, like thousands of others in Detroit, was told that the house she thought she had purchased wasn’t actually hers.

Intertwined memories of institutions, family, and the creepy side of industrialization.

“My career is not my life. It’s a hobby.”

In 1966, Anton LaVey introduced the world to the Church of Satan. The 1980s saw a “Satanic Panic” in the form of abuse charges brought against child-care workers and suburban parents. Today, the author joins a group of Satanists for afternoon tea at the church’s global headquarters in a “bland New York college town.”

How $100 million in cuts created chaos in Florida’s mental hospitals.

Thirty years ago, Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering fell in love as freshman at the University of Virginia. It was the same year Haysom’s parents were brutally murdered. Each says the other committed the crime.

As the birds decline, one Icelandic island keeps throwing a rowdy, boozy puffin festival.

Five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed on American soil between 1981 and 1990. The prime suspects? Members of the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, a group of former military commanders from South Vietnam.

On Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who pushed America to war. Chalabi died on Tuesday at the age of 71.

An attempt to figure out how the Times columnist came to care more about personal morality than politics.

The writer reconnects with an old acquaintance who ten years earlier committed one of the most notorious crimes in New York history.

On the stories we tell ourselves about happiness and the indecent questions we ask women who decided not to become moms.

In what will likely be his last political act, Willie Nelson declares war on corporate marijuana.

He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her.  No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.

A trip to Papua New Guinea, “an island caught between the ancient world and 2015.”

On Republican consultant John Weaver and the art of political seduction.

A conversation with “the most popular human alive.”

A profile of New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman.