Longform

An inside look at how an ad agency sells a car in 2015.

On equating beauty with self-worth.

Gregg Bemis is an 87-year-old retired venture capitalist who owns the salvage rights to the Lusitania. He’s determined to prove an alternate theory as to why the ship was attacked in 1915. Unfortunately, the Irish government isn’t so into his plan.

An orphan named Patience and an argument for open immigration.

A meditation on life in the black “upper class.”

He went from a viral pop hit to an arrest for conspiracy to murder charges in just under six months. Was Bobby Shmurda “too real” for his label?

How the overdiagnosis of disease makes for unnecessary treatment, high anxiety, and ballooning costs.

Following two leading figures of the #BlackLivesMatter movement through five months of protests.

Harsh sentences have given us an aging prison population, and all the medical problems that come with age are beginning to choke the system.

John Beale was an exemplary employee at the Environmental Protection Agency. He also led a double life, though not the rumored one at the CIA his colleagues whispered about.

On women, monarchy, and breeding.

A steep discount on pharmaceutical drugs leads to a mass-murder case.

Pacquiao and his entourage.

Arthur Mondella took over his family’s maraschino cherry business reluctantly. But once he had it, he started a second enterprise. Behind an unmarked roll-down gate, behind some of his prized luxury cars, behind a pair of closet doors, behind a set of button-controlled shelves, behind a fake wall and down a ladder in a hole in the floor, Mondella built a 2,500-square-foot marijuana factory. When the police finally found it, he shot himself.

The multimillionaire David Gundlach had trouble, all his life, reading social cues. For reasons no one quite understands, he left most of his fortune to Elkhart, Indiana.

On the second-class status of women film directors.

“Quebec is the Saudi Arabia of maple syrup,” and it has the authoritarian regulatory regime to prove it.

“Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.”

On Juliana Buhring, a former cult member who became the first woman to bike around the world.

What happens when a successfully funded Kickstarter product fails to launch?

The last all-male clubs in Britain are contemplating admitting women. But a significant proportion of their members still want to preserve the spaces as male-only.

A group buys the city of Detroit with lottery winnings.