Longform

The politics behind the anti-trend trend known as “Normcore” turn out to be as conservative as ever.

An innocent man was executed – in 1761. Voltaire got on the case.

Academics are convinced it’s an intelligent satire.

Miriam Carey died at the hands of the Secret Service. Over a year later, her family has no real answers about what happened to her.

The writer Alfred Chester, who died alone in a Jerusalem apartment in 1971 at just 37, was brilliant. He was also insane.

Rumor had it that a teenager had cut off a man’s penis, and the cops happened to have a murder victim that answered that description. Nothing else lined up.

The quest to create a friction-free Disney World.

“It took me 32 years to come out. This is what happened when I did.”

Locals on the Outer Banks are arguing about whether climate change is real. Meanwhile, their islands are disappearing.

“Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea.”

Two friends found a literary magazine; fantastical complications and potentials ensue. From Aira's newest collection, The Musical Brain.

"So, predictably, we began to consider a first issue that would be thirty-six-fold, so to speak. An issue made up of numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36. That would allow for an almost total flexibility. Why hadn’t we thought of it before? Why had we wasted our time with 'triples' and 'quadruples' and 'decuples' when there was such an obvious solution right under our noses? The printer’s 'sheet' should have shown us the way right from the start, from the moment we discovered its existence, the famous “sheet” that was unfolding now before our eyes, like a rose in time."

He was a fixture in the kitchen of one of Seattle’s most celebrated restaurants, with plans to move to New York City to further his career. Then he robbed a bank.

Perhaps because your people have always hunted them. But also because there’s demand in New York fashion circles for their pelts.

Besieged by pirates, and youngsters unused to paying to watch sex, the porn industry just isn’t what it used to be.

How Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., an openly gay hedge fund star, came to marry Ellen Pao, a partner at a powerful Silicon Valley firm, before they “went to war with their elite worlds.”

Robert Marbut is in the business of helping cities criminalize homelessness.

A French reporter went undercover as potential “caliphette” and recieved a marriage proposal from a senior ISIS commander.

Giving up the iPhone ghost, and other forays into knock-off technology.

Twelve columns about the boxer’s descent, originally published in the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times.

“Some of the best lines — and I’ve been lucky to hear really nutso lines over the years — are not in response to any kind of question. It’s in response to, ‘I don’t know.’”