Longform

The world’s greatest animator, Yuri Norstein, hasn’t released a new film in 37 years.

Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.

Caliphate and the perils of reporting online.

A typo investigation.

The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped?

He planned to write a memoir, The Life of a Migrant. Its central thesis: The American Dream is a lie.

On the questions DNA tests answer and the new ones they create.

On October 17, 1973, John McClamrock was paralyzed playing high school football. Doctors doubted he would make it through the night. But he and his mother refused to give up—for more than three decades.

An essay about artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence, and finding an ending.

By the time I got access to the model, it was late July, 2020. In the fifth month of quarantine, having recently moved home to face my teenage journals, I wasn’t sure if I missed talking to strangers or to Omar. But I wanted to know if, with enough prodding, I could turn GPT-3 into either, or at least convince myself that I had.

Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon.

A story of gambling addiction, in seven parts.

In 1974, John Patterson was abducted by the People’s Liberation Army of Mexico—a group no one had heard of before. The kidnappers wanted $500,000, and insisted that Patterson’s wife deliver the ransom.

A profile of the professional wrestler.

The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells.

“And while maybe you don’t care if Justin Bieber ever does make his way back to a kind of normalcy, perhaps you can admit there is at least something admirable, in the abstract, about someone finding a way to survive, and even to become kind, when all they’ve been taught since a young age, by millions of adoring people, is that there is no need for them to be kind at all. And if that doesn’t move you, then maybe you can at least find sociological interest in the process that Bieber is about to recount here, which is how you turn into someone you don’t want to be, and what you do about it once you decide you want to be someone else. Someone better, even.”

How a self-taught linguist came to own an indigenous language.

Bitcoin partying at an Orlando hotel with worshippers of the blockchain.

What will it take to get the world’s choral musicians back together again?

A reporter watches as a Hindu nationalist government uses tech from the companies he covers to destroy a secular democracy.

The jewels of America’s landscape should belong to America’s original peoples.

Hundreds of workers at a Tampa lead smelter have been exposed to dangerous levels of the neurotoxin. The consequences have been profound.