Longform

Testimonies about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, reported by the 2015 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The plan, basically: bring back the two founders (who were estranged), focus entirely on mobile, and apologize as much as possible.

A moment of racism at Harvard leads the writer to consider Huckleberry Finn.

The frustrated – and well-hidden – story of Isabel Myers Briggs, inventor of the famous personality test.

Racial discrimination and the collection of small consumer debts.

The men whose profitable (and self-serving) antics preserved what we know of the Brontë sisters.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

On the eve of their daughter's wedding, a divorced couple is confused by old feelings despite sexual identities.

They were raised Hasidic in Brooklyn. Now Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz live a decadent, booze-filled life in Puerto Rico. They are in their early 30s and rich enough to retire, while Wall Street is busy adopting the shady loan scheme they pioneered.

Why The Undefeated, a site announced more than two years ago, still hasn’t launched.

The art and science (or lack thereof) of water dowsing.

“I was one of the few guys rooting for the comet to hit the Earth. Statistically, more people that deserved to go would go.”

When Elysian Brewing sold itself to Big Beer, it set off a revolt among Seattle craft beer enthusiasts.

Inside Zappos as it transitions to something called a “Teal organization” that involves no managers and what amounts scouting merit badges and something called “People Points.”

Who we think we are in 2015.

When rival gangs confronted each other in the parking lot of a Hooters-esque restaurant, bullets flew. But was the whole a police setup?

The dangerous corporate ethos of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who is on trial after an explosion at one of his mines killed 29.

The sudden emergence of Bernie Sanders.

Audrey Elrod thought she had found the man of her dreams. Today she is in a West Virginia prison. She’s broke. And the court has ordered her to pay more than $400,000 to victims of the same man who conned her.

Susan Hawk was the first woman elected as Dallas County district attorney. She also suffers from depression.

On the sex lives of the castrati.

A profile of Joe Biden, written not long after the car crash that killed his wife and daughter.

An unlikely friendship bloomed in Oxford, Mississippi between a 30-year-old drug dealer and a college-bound teen after a chance meeting at a hotel pool. Then the dealer began to suspect that his friend was one of the 30 or so confidential informants that Metro Narcotics recruits from around the college town each year.

One prison’s efforts to rehabilitate captured members of Boko Haram.