Longform

“The government calls it “Operation Open Market,” a four-year investigation resulting, so far, in four federal grand jury indictments against 55 defendants in 10 countries, facing a cumulative millennium of prison time. What many of those alleged scammers, carders, thieves, and racketeers have in common is one simple mistake: They bought their high-quality fake IDs from a sophisticated driver’s license counterfeiting factory secretly established, owned, and operated by the United States Secret Service.”

Team America voyages to Jordan’s King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center to compete against top-seeded China and other squads in challenges based on counter-terrorism scenarios.

Remembering the indie rock club that The New York Times once said was “so New York that it’s in New Jersey.”

The money has dried up, the models are broken and “there are simply many, many more high-priced lawyers today than there is high-priced legal work.” On the end of an era.

The fate of a star 16-year-old pitcher in Japan.

Why some innovations spread quick while others take decades to catch hold.

How Goldman Sachs made $5 billion by controlling supply and manipulating the aluminum market.

On paleopathologist Gino Fornaciari and his investigations into murders from centuries past.

California’s most prolific serial killer returns with little fanfare after a 13-year break.

The murder of an Olympic champion and the autopsy that shook a city.

Reporting on drug-resistant tuberculosis across Papua New Guinea – and then contracting the disease.

The mysterious life and death of Dow B. Hover, the man who ran New York’s electric chair.

How a corporate network engineer became one of Aleppo’s most prolific weapons manufacturers.

The plot to turn Texas blue.

How a bioethicist’s field of study—suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death—”turned unbearably personal.”

The multiple lives of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Whitewater rafting down a Chilean river with a movie star and the Kennedys.

On literary manifestos, long-distance reading, and the egg of death.

In 1913, a ship carrying 31 explorers got stuck in the Arctic ice, hundreds of miles from civilization. The leader left to carry on the expedition. Others stuck with the boat. Help wouldn’t come for a year.

Jurors from the Emmett Till trial revisit the case 50 years later.

A personal history of class in America.

A profile of the writer behind “Deep Thoughts” on Saturday Night Live.

With the first on the scene of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 disaster.