Longform

An interview with Cleve Backster, a former interrogation specialist with the CIA who used a polygraph machine in the 1960s to develop his theory of “primary perception,” which contends that plants have feelings.

They advertise murder for hire but work for the government. Inside the world of America’s fake hit men.

Eleven months after Sandy Hook, Newtown’s mourning remains incalculable, especially that of the parents who lost their children. And the influx of sympathy—and money—has sometimes made the grieving more difficult rather than less.

Inside the N.S.A.’s mission to spy on just about everyone.

The world’s richest prisoner interviewed from the Siberian prison colony he calls home.

He’d blown the Denver debate. Now he was on the verge of blowing the second and risking his reelection. “I just don’t know if I can do this,” Obama told his team. The story of how they turned things around, excerpted from Double Down: Game Change 2012.

Separating truth from lore in Haiti: “The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said—but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.”

What did soccer have to do with two brutal murders after a pickup game?

The complicated case of Michelle Kosilek, a murderer fighting for sexual reassignment surgery.

A profile of personal finance guru Dave Ramsey, who built his biblically inspired get-out-of-debt empire on the premise “it’s within your power to not take part in recessions and the economic troubles facing American families.”

For years, Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known as General Butt Naked, was one of Liberia’s most feared warlords. Then he became a pastor. Today he visits the families of his victims to seek forgiveness for his sins.

Ending a pregnancy in the most “pro-life” state in America.

Frederick Douglass and the specter of slavery in Talbot County, Maryland.

An examination of the Minutemen movement and death on the border.

A profile of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who has spent the last 30 years trying to replicate the human mind.

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

How architecture has made Los Angeles a bank robber’s paradise.

Lauren spent six years of her childhood locked in a closet, starved and tortured by her birth mother and stepfather. Miraculously, she survived; that’s when her long road to recovery began.

Memories of a lovely afternoon with a serial killer.

What the popular game says about our subconscious.

A profile of the policy wonk who shone the light and turned the tide on overseas tax havens.

How Michael Manos, a.k.a. the Glam Scammer, a career con man who relied on a combination of fake reality TV shows and fake fundraisers to bilk people in Atlanta, Dallas, and D.C., finally got caught.

A profile of the comedian.