Longform

Inside the abusive practices of magazine-subscription sub-contractors.

Doc was a medical student in his 40s, but he spent his nights with the teenagers who hung around his San Antonion apartment complex, buying them drugs and booze. The first time he asked one of them to ritualistically kill him, they laughed it off. He would ask again.

When an accountant decided to call foul on Halliburton’s financial record-keeping, he thought he was doing the right thing. He spent 10 years fighting for the courts to agree.

Tracking Spalding Grey’s descent towards suicide.

The CNN anchor may not be the clueless bumbler the internet believes him to be.

When Putin suggested to Obama that the White House and the Kremlin speak through an intermediary, he named who he thought was the obvious candidate: his friend Steven Seagal.

What remains of the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

Is it homage? An art project? Whatever it is, it is very Brooklyn 2015.

Nearly 20 years ago in a remote California town, a 16-year-old named Karen Mitchell disappeared. The case went cold, but last month local law enforcement started looking at it again after the arrest of a former resident: Robert Durst.

The rise and fall of “America’s most exciting black scholar.”

Kidnappers in Mexico have changed their business model from retail to wholesale—instead of extorting a handful of rich families, they are targeting thousands of undocumented migrants.

Gerry Pickens took a paycut to join the police department in tiny, overwhelmingly white Orting, Washington. Fired less than a year later, he’s now suing the town for enough to break it.

A week at Coachella with the rapper and some mushrooms.

The murder of a 34-year-old by a wig-wearing figure traces back to meth, an FBI sting and a former municipal judge who once sent a live copperhead snake to a foe through the U.S. mail.

On Brent White, the joke whisperer who edits the largely improvisational comedies of Paul Feig, Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

On a 16-year-old with a debilitating disorder: trichtillomania.

There’s still a gold rush on in the Andes.

The question for researchers isn’t “How smart are dolphins?” It’s “How are dolphins smart?”

The politics and rhetoric of Trevor Noah’s appointment as the new host of the Daily Show.

Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.

In 1992, a magazine story introduced the world to the photographs of Sally Mann. Here, she responds to the firestorm that article produced.

Life behind the Beatles curtain, with the man whose real name is actually Richard Starkey.

One famous critic (Adler) takes another (Pauline Kael) to task for a collection of reviews that is “without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”