Longform

Following Muammar Qaddafi’s death in 2011, Libya had hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the story of how it was erased.

The World Cup and Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

“My mother kept scrapbooks of everything any of her children did all their lives, and among my scrapbooks are newspapers that I wrote on the typewriter at the age of six, The Hersey Family News, with ads offering my older brothers for various kinds of hard labor at very low wages.”

On Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr and now Slack, a wildly popular, difficult-to-describe messaging service that has 38,000 paying subscribers just a few months after launching.

On the private, for-profit probation industry.

Partying with a lost tycoon on his birthday.

A profile of Garry Kasparov, who exiled himself from Russia last year and is running for president of FIDE, the governing body of chess. The election has become the dirtiest in FIDE history and a proxy debate over freedom and Russia’s future; Kasparov’s opponent has the full backing of Vladimir Putin.

On the history of masturbation.

“I write this with a baseball bat by the bed.”

Louis Scarcella was a star New York City detective in the ’80s and ’90s, cracking cases no one else could. Now it appears that many of the people he put away were innocent, forced into false confessions and convicted with testimony from flimsy witnesses. Scarcella maintains that he did nothing wrong, despite evidence against him much stronger than in many of his cases.

On the coast of Abu Dhabi, gilded outposts of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and New York University are being built by foreign workers who cannot leave and are paid half of what they were promised.

In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for starting a fire that killed his three daughters. The case hinged on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Johnny E. Webb. Today, Webb says he lied.

What U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul has seen in Russia since he arrived two and a half years ago.

A profile of celebrity cat Lil BUB and the man who was contemplating bankruptcy before he found her.

Barack Obama on Africa, Putin and the gap between what CEOs tell him over lunch and what they tell their lobbyists.

How an honors student became a hired killer.

An excerpt from Murakami's forthcoming novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.</a>

Hunting people who hunt elephants.

How Gary Gygax, a semi-employed shoe repairman, built and lost the Dungeons & Dragons empire.

A profoundly neglected 6-year-old gets a new home.

On Singapore’s attempt to create a more harmonious society using mass surveillance and data analysis.

A profile of a doctor fighting Ebola in Uganda.