Longform

Why 18th-century French police obsessively tracked elite sex workers.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, Southern schools have been resegregated.

Barack Obama wanted to endorse gay marriage on his own timetable. Joe Biden had other plans.

Inside the lack of an investigation into Florida State Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston.

On addiction and addiction narratives.

Do jellyfish have minds?

Deep inside the world of Cartoon Network’s most popular show.

On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.

Yasiel Puig’s journey to the Dodgers.

The dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers.

A diagnosis in question.

Shai Agassi had nearly $1 billion in funding and a dream to replace gas guzzlers with electric cars. All he was missing was a plan.

On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and vanished without a trace.

A fragile relationship teeters during a family vacation.

How to buy college football players, in the words of a man who delivers the money.

Robert Aaron was a veteran horn player who sold bags of heroin to friends to support his own habit. Then his friend Philip Seymour Hoffman overdosed.

A profile of photographer Ryan McGinley.

The story of a massacre in El Salvador.

“In the recent history of American music, there’s no figure parallel to Lehrer in his effortless ascent to fame, his trajectory into the heart of the culture — and then his quiet, amiable, inexplicable departure.”

“Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can…”

An ode to aging.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, on crying in movie theaters, “attention whores” and David Foster Wallace.