Longform

A profile of Valeria Lukyanova, otherwise known as the “Human Barbie.”

Jai Alai once packed Florida’s frontons with gamblers and glamor. Today, America is down to a single top-level pro who plays under the name Tevin in honor of Tevin Campbell.

The last days of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

What happened to the only child who survived the 1985 MOVE bombing.

The downside of opening up.

“That educated women’s eggs are in demand is one thing, that they are willing to provide them is another.”

Cassie Chadwick pulled her first con in 1870, at the age of 13. Over the next 30 years, she would scam her way to $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.

On the mechanics of New Jersey state politics.

Two men, separated by more than 150 years, discover the folly of attempting Western-style capitalism in Micronesia.

A case for why race has been the real story of the Obama presidency all along.

Inside Harun Yahya, which promotes a “sexed-up Disney version of Islam,” publishes a 800-page creationist atlas, runs a surreal TV station, and has films it members in orgies that often include high-ranking politicians.

Migrant workers in California and the consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy.

The mysterious death of Alfred Wright in the shadow of a town’s history of racial violence.

Stolen time with the writer as he neared the end.

Following the hunters and poachers, servers and saviors of the little-known pangolin—a scaly, endangered creature sold by the thousands on the black market.

The author relives her Romanian youth and the imprisonment of her father through the Securitate files kept on her family.

An addict navigates 1980s Detroit.

On Michael Jackson’s talent.

A teenager orchestrates his own attempted murder via an Internet chatroom.

An investigation into the ill-fated text messaging platform ZunZuneo.

A dispatch from Vermont, which is in the midst of what the governor calls a “full-blown heroin crisis.”

“Every Sunday at my house … we watched The Ed Sullivan Show…. Whether we enjoyed it or not. That was my first lesson in show business. I don’t think anybody in the house particularly enjoyed it. We just watched it. Maybe that’s the purpose of television. You just turn it on and watch it whether you want to or not.”

The case against Jonathan Pollard, an American who spied for Israel.