Longform

On the kids who are spiritual leaders before the age of ten.

Chronicling 1,541 days with a car accident survivor.

On the particular genius of Tolstoy.

On the service’s multiple origin stories.

The inside story of the coup that has brought the world’s most feared terrorist network to the brink of collapse.

Troubles and afflictions weigh on counselors and veterans.

"The Fort was actually just an ugly house. Eighteen rooms, two stories. A kitchen, a lavatory, a staircase. One office, one entrance, two exits, thirty-six bunks, four televisions, the mini-library, two footballs, one fútbol, a basketball, and the whole of Big Ben, the biggest backyard in Texas. It housed between twenty-one and thirty-two bodies a year. Most of them stayed a couple months. They found us through each other."

A 38,000-word answer.

Alanis Morissette, before the making of Jagged Little Pill.

A profile of the world’s best League of Legends player, a 19-year-old Korean kid whose nickname is God.

When Elon Musk went to Russia to buy some rockets.

On the Republican slate for the 2016 presidential election: “Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure.”

Utah has become the capital of the modern snake oil industry, with dozens of get-rich-quick schemes – also known as “multi-level marketing” – filling its office parks.

Members of the multiplicity community say they are many different people–sometimes so many they think of themselves as a city–all existing within one body.

On the Event Horizon telescope, the largest ever built.

A cornucopia of endearments and insults.

A trip to the writers’ room of The Onion spinoff, which started as a BuzzFeed parody but has morphed into something else: “the institutional voice of the Internet.”

The last trip of a dedicated wanderer.

Madeleine Fullard is on a mission to locate the remains of apartheid’s murdered activists. She needs the help of Eugene de Kock, a former police squad leader known as “Prime Evil,” to do so.

On the perils and rewards of feminism.

A group of Gambian exiles scattered around America plotted to storm the Presidential palace and overthrow a brutal dictator. Their budget? $221,000.

Spending the summer as a tour guide on a glacier.

A daughter remembers her father’s glass eye.

On being held hostage by Somali pirates.