Longform

One day you’re teaching yourself to play the piano in hotel lobbies, the next you’re contributing a song to a David Lynch soundtrack.

It’s not just the virus that stands in the way, it’s bureaucratic logistics, and the frightening look of those hazmat suits.

While fleeing their Mali stronghold, al-Qaida left behind documents describing not how to terrorize a population, but how to govern.

Ending homelessness is really quite simple: give people somewhere to live. Why’s Utah the only place willing to try it?

The history of a powerful and violent secret society in the islands of southern Chile.

The team’s grand, analytics-driven experiment led by a business school grad who won the GM job after giving a “PowerPoint presentation that Sixers executives now recall as an ‘investment thesis.’”

Turning down the huge amounts of money a fracking contract can offer is always the beginning of a fight.

Key and Peele try to make comedic sense of America’s confusions about race. Their secret? “Really, there’s no actual strategy.”

A patient arrives in a therapist’s office complaining of writer’s block. He’s not in search of the talking cure, though.

Finding Culture, with a capital-c, is not as simple as just leaving a city.

The article that kept the New Yorker alive was written by a debutante. Who happened to be married to Irving Berlin.

Lester Cotton’s transformation from reluctant football player to top Alabama recruit, and the hopes and dreams of a neighborhood that ride on his shoulders.

The pecking order of All-Star Weekend sex-with-basketball-player-or-rapper hopefuls.

David Carr’s advice for the 2014 graduating class at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

The many lives of Josh Tillman, who on the way to releasing one of the year’s best albums was “a defiant child of God, a broke dishwasher, a successful drummer, a Dionysian shaman, a failed poet, a drug-hoovering spiritualist, and a gleeful prankster.”

They’re still printing it on paper.

She was not just a poet, she was an “event” in American literature all by herself.

With a little South American reinterpretation, Confederate imagery becomes harmless kitsch. Or does it?

In Florida, sinker cypress harvesters have to dodge the law while working their trade.

Adult life for the autistic is littered with misunderstandings, anger, and group homes.

In spite of the boiling-hot anticipation of its release, no one had much fun making this movie.

President Lincoln worked very hard all his life. After he died, his corpse kept a gruelling travel schedule, too.

As a child, Hugo Lucitante was brought to America from a tiny jungle village in Ecuador. His heart’s still back home.