Longform

The making and near unmaking of Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout film.

Why do we honor dead soldiers rather than the fighters who deserted and the activists who demanded peace?

A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism.

The mainstreaming of livestreaming.

Ann Casey pulled herself out of poverty by becoming one of the most revered wrestlers in America. Then she was shot by a drug-running truck driver. This is the story of her comeback.

The short-lived literary career of Breece DʼJ Pancake and his roadmap to a world of oppressive poverty.

Without fanfare—indeed, with some misgivings about its new status—China has just overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy.

Women who kill their newborns usually claim to have been in denial about their pregnancies. Can you carry a child to term without realizing it?

The president of Kiribati goes to Norway to bear witness to climate change.

Learning about death from a sixth-generation funeral director.

A tango dancer’s tragic accident ends her career and makes her briefly dependent on her roommate’s compassion.

How solitary confinement can lead to suicide.

What it was like to edit The New Republic at its most contentious.

One of the little tweaks I made the first time I got the job was to change the slogan on the table of contents from “A Journal of Politics and the Arts” back to the original: “A Weekly Journal of Opinion.” All the fine reporting notwithstanding, what The New Republic did best, had always done best, was opinion. Its politics were polemical, its art was the art of argument.

After 13 years of war, the United States has helped create a nation ruled by drug lords.

An essay on PTSD.

Opening up about medical mistakes.

Telephone poles began to appear around the same time that white Americans started lynching black Americans.

Three men are exonerated, almost 40 years after a 12-year-old’s coerced testimony led to their murder convictions.

What the first-sale doctrine means for the future of copyright.

The author’s long-running relationship with the grotesque.

A brutal assault and the struggle for justice at the University of Virginia.

Note 12/5/14: Rolling Stone has stated that they now doubt details of the facts reported in "A Rape on Campus."

More information is available in T. Rees Shapiro's "U-Va. Fraternity to Rebut Claims of Gang Rape in Rolling Stone" from The Washington Post.

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On the border of Utah and Arizona, Mormon fundamentalists have long lived according to their own rules. When a former sect member and his family moved to the town where he’d grown up, they expected a homecoming. What they got was a war.

75 years ago, Marguerite Perey unearthed an element while working as a technician in Marie Curie’s lab. Her achievement came at a great cost.

In the gentrifying Bywater, the intertwined destinies of a legendary gay pool-bar and a woman who was drugged there.