Enemy Inside the Wire: The Untold Story of the Battle of Bastion
An account of the night last September when 15 Taliban, dressed as American soldiers, snuck onto one of the largest air bases in Afghanistan.
Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
How real-time information can make you a better human.
Varieties of Disturbance
A profile of Claire Danes.
Searching for Robert Johnson
The legacy of a phantom bluesman.
On the Thomas Pynchon Trail
“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”
The Magic Jews
Adventures with a group of young Hasidic men looking for God in psychedelic drugs.
City of the Lost
Life inside Za’atari, a camp for Syrian refugees just across the Jordanian border, where “the dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a friend. What is left is a kind of theatrical pride, the necessary performance of will.”
A Solution From Hell
A history of humanitarian intervention.
The Meaning of Work
Chris, a 25-year-old black man, tries to get a good job.
Tommy Morrison's Latest Big Fight
In search of the former boxing champ, who refuses to believe he has HIV.
Taken
A 55-year-old cold case ends with a conviction. But was justice really served?
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A Child Vanishes
Playing outside after dinner, best friends Kathy and Maria meet a man calling himself “Johnny.” Kathy runs home to grab mittens; upon her return, her 7-year-old friend and the stranger are nowhere to be found.
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Women Wronged
The story of Jack McCullough, once known as John Tessier, a man who once lived near Kathy and Maria and has a troubling history of abusing women.
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Bulldogs on the Case
Police zero in on McCullough after a deathbed confession.
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'That's Him'
Half a century after her friend was abducted, Kathy identifies the man who took Maria.
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The Whole Truth?
Jack McCullough is convicted of Maria’s kidnapping and murder, but questions are raised about the evidence (or lack thereof) presented at trial.
Chemical Warfare in Syria
“At first, there is only a little sound, a metallic ping, almost a click.”
'F--- Rap, Laying Back Eating Poutine'
Three days on road with former chef and current rap eccentric Action Bronson.
Sponsor: Nate Anderson's Guide to Internet Crime
This guide is sponsored by </i>The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed</b></a>, the new book from Ars Technica Deputy Editor Nate Anderson.</p>
A excerpt from </i>The Internet Police is available on Longform. Already read it? Here's a collection of Nate's all-time favorite internet crime stories.
The Man Behind The Historic Implosion Of The Ex-Gay Movement
Meet Alan Chambers, former leader of Exodus International–a “pray the gay away” ministry.
Gibbeted
On the hanging of James Murphy, murderer.
Eli Saslow is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a contributor at ESPN the Magazine.
"It's not really my place to complain about it being hard for me to write. I wrote the story ("After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet") and I got to leave it. And even when I was writing the story, I was only experiencing what they were experiencing in a super fractional way. The hard part is that it was a story where there are no breaks, there's no—it is this relentless, sort of bottomless pain and I struggled with that. … A story can only have so many crushing moments, otherwise they just all wash out. But the other truth is: it is what it is. It's an impossibly heartbreaking situation. And making the story anything other than relentlessly heartbreaking would've been doing an injustice to what they're dealing with."
Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.
MediaTakeout: Fear of a Black TMZ
The story of mediatakeout.com, a gossip site with a monthly audience of 16 million and a loose relationship with the truth.
460 Days in Captivity
A 27-year old reporter is kidnapped in Somalia and held hostage for over a year.
America’s Worst Community Colleges
On the dysfunctional community colleges of San Francisco.
Remote Control
On the immense power of ESPN.
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Part 1: The Mechanics of Influence
How ESPN dictates the college football schedule.
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Part 2: Anytime, Anywhere
How ESPN turned Louisville into a powerhouse.
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Part 3: Protecting the Empire
How ESPN, which earns more than four times what any other cable channel does in subscriber fees, fights in Washington to preserve its “beautiful business model.”
A Butler Well Served by This Election
A profile of long-time White House butler Eugene Allen. This article served as inspiration for the recent movie “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”
Sponsored
Sponsor: "The Internet Police" by Nate Anderson
In The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed, Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson takes readers on a behind-the-screens tour of landmark cybercrime cases, revealing how criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed.
Questions of online crime are as complex and interconnected as the internet itself. With each episode in The Internet Police, Anderson shows the dark side of online spaces—but also how dystopian a fully “ordered” alternative would be.
Buy the Book:</a></em>
Amazon • Barnes & Noble • iBookstore • Indiebound • Powell's
Road Trip!
Fast cars and bad decisions in a race through Southern Europe known as the “Gumball 3000.”
Heroin/e
Remembering the loss of a parent and the birth of an addiction.
