Jen Percy is the author of Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism.
"As is the nature of obsession, you just start gathering materials, hoarding documents and taking notes in a way that’s totally chaotic and overwhelming. You don’t even care yet because you’re so excited by what you’re gathering. If you start trying to make a narrative out of it too soon it will be false or fall apart."
Thanks to TinyLetter and Dear Thief, the new novel by Samantha Harvey, for sponsoring this week's episode.
In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.
On cattle auctions, reality TV and coming of age during the Great Recession.
An American journalist on being kidnapped, tortured and released in Syria.
What do you do when you think a family member is a murderer? Step one: stop eating her food.
On spear-wielding chimps who hunt for meat.
The story of Frank Bourassa, the world’s most prolific counterfeiter.
Margaret Keane’s husband stole credit for her iconic paintings, basking in fame and fortune that should have been hers for years. Then she told a reporter the truth.
He has a staff of 300. His website gets more traffic than Gawker and has 300,000 paying subscribers. He has a clothing line, a string of bestselling books, a movie studio and a radio show syndicated on 400 stations. A profile of Glenn Beck, mogul.
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The inside story of the Pink Panthers, the greatest bank robber in Texas history and the article that became The Bling Ring—a collection of our all-time favorite picks about thieves.
Magicians, mafiosos, a missing painting and the heist of a lifetime.
“We, the writers—a word I am using in its most primitive sense—arrived in Chicago about 10 days before the baffling, bruising, an unbelievable two minutes and six seconds at Comiskey Park. We will get to all that later.”
Scrutinizing the gluten-free craze.
The laborers who keep dick pics out of your Facebook feed, the geneticists who could help contain Ebola, and the shame of having poor teeth in a rich world — the most read articles this week in the new Longform App, available free for iPhone and iPad.
A grandmother tells her story.
Javier Flores had hopes of a last-minute change in policy that would allow him to stay in Ohio with his wife and four kids, where he had a good job, a house, paid taxes. It didn’t come.
Those who survived tell the story of twenty three ISIS hostages’ shared months of brutal captivity before some were ransomed and some executed.
Kelli Stapleton, whose teenage daughter was autistic and prone to violent rages, had come to fear for her life. So she made a decision that perhaps only she could justify.
The misadventures of two hospital workers.
Walking the East Tennessee woods with a Carol, aka “The Forest Granny,” a woman who lives off the land.
Monaco’s richest woman was shot in ambush outside a hospital. Her heirs stand to inherit over a billion dollars each.
An epilogue to Serpico.
On the origin of the essay.
The grim world of outsourced content moderation.
The on and offline search for the prime suspect in last month’s celebrity nude photo hacking scandal.
