Longform

“The supernatural stuff doesn’t get to me anymore. But here’s the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years: The movie opens with a woman in late middle-age, sitting at a table and writing a story. And the story goes something like, then the branches creaked in the - and she stops, and she says to her husband: What are those things? I can’t think of them. They’re in the backyard, and they’re very tall, and birds land on the branches. And he says, why, Iris, those are trees. And she says, yes, how silly of me. And she writes the word, and the movie starts. That’s Iris Murdoch, and she’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”

A week in the life of Naomi and Spencer Haskell.

Why the head of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey hired a former CIA agent to ruin a freelance writer’s career.

A profile of Dennis Rodman today.

How Jeffrey Katzenberg became the Democrats’ kingmaker.

The author, an abortion counselor, was 40 and pregnant when a conflicted Catholic woman came to her clinic.

How the foreclosure crisis ignited a new form of activism in Chicago’s vacant homes.

A college football coach is falsely accused of producing and possessing child pornography.

A profile of the greatest checkers player of all time.

The story behind the iconic photograph of the Holmes family, hiding in the water amidst violent Tasmanian bushfires.

“Southwark’s petty thugs must have thought all their birthdays had come at once: a well-dressed toff stumbling round their borough in no state to defend himself, and with an alcoholic street whore as his only companion.”

Reconstructing a mysterious 1892 London murder.

“Jeannie Peeper’s diagnosis meant that, over her lifetime, she would essentially develop a second skeleton. Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness. The Mayo doctors didn’t tell Peeper’s parents that. All they did say was that Peeper would not live long.”

In the ring, Hector “Macho” Camacho was a champ. Out of it, he was a coke-fueled, womanizing wild man, until the appetites that consumed him cost him his life.

On decorated sniper Chris Kyle and the troubled young veteran who took his life.

An oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker, as poker went mainstream in America and online players invaded the competition.

The story of Héctor Espino, the greatest hitter never to play in the majors.

“I haven’t put out an album in 20 years. Let’s face it. I am an oldies act. I just don’t want it to be like when you watch Channel 13 and there’s the Delltones or some English band from the ’60s, and they’re real crotchety and they look terrible, and I go, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to be on that show.’”

The story of a tobacco industry whistleblower.

Inside Brigham Young University’s successful animation program.

A beloved girls’ basketball coach is accused of sexually molesting several of his players.

Patsy Cline’s hometown and the debate over her legacy.

How self-harm came to take more lives than war, murder and natural disasters combined.