Longform

The journey from a Sudanese refugee camp to an Atlanta police academy.

In 2009, three followers of an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker named James Arthur Ray died in an Arizona sweat lodge. Now, after serving two years in prison for negligent homicide, Ray is trying to get back on the self-help circuit.

One woman’s beautiful, strange, and troubling final days.

On the volunteer “Wikipedians” who devote their free time to editing Wikipedia.

A profile of Avishek Sengupta, who drowned at the Walk the Plank obstacle during an endurance race last year.

On the sudden death of an up-and-coming rapper.

In 1902, a poet attempts to stage the world’s first “perfume concert.”

Visiting Cambodia, and a Khmer Rouge prison camp, 30 years after the genocide.

The war between Major League Baseball and Alex Rodriguez, “fought with six-figure payoffs in the tanning salons and strip malls of South Florida.”

He was the poster boy for the movement to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now Dan Choi is sleeping on a couch, smoking too much weed, watching TED talks and wondering what he’ll do with the rest of his life.

On Ambien and the search for the next blockbuster insomnia drug.

At 9:14pm on November 22, 1987, sportscaster Dan Roan was doing the Bears highlights on Chicago’s WGN-TV when the station’s signal was hijacked. Someone wearning a rubber Max Headroom mask appeared, silently, on TV screens around the city. A few hours later, Headroom popped up again on another channel, this time for longer and with audio. Despite FBI and FCC investigations, the case remains unsolved.

How the American worker got screwed.

In the ’90s, a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie exposed an AIDS epidemic in rural China and the ensuing government cover-up. Forced to leave, she’s now 85 and living alone in New York.

The conspiracy theories surrounding the 1931 death of Hitler’s niece and object of affection.

On the factories of India and the women whose lives they ruin.

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

The death of a Russian dissident and how radioactive poison became a tool of assassins.

A profile of the world’s top photo retoucher, who typically can retouch over 100 images in a single issue of Vogue.

A political history of Donald Rumsfeld.

On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.

Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

Lyndon Baines Johnson in retirement.