Longform

The author visits Franklin County, Mississippi, where, according to census data, there are zero same-sex couples.

How a 100-mile footrace saved a beleaguered town.

In 1913, Joe Knowles became a media sensation after fleeing into the Maine woods wearing nothing but a jockstrap. Two months and one bear-clubbing incident later, the “Nature Man” returned to civilization as a hero. But was it all hoax?

The case for gay marriage.

On former nursing student One L. Goh, who killed six people at Oikos University in Oakland, California, and what it means to the Korean immigrant community.

Meet Colorado’s suburban, Ramada-dwelling homeless.

A former Facebook executive critiques Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” movement.

How a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

On the Adderall days of college.

A profile of organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who argues that the key to success comes from helping others.

On the new science of collective behavior.

How the Brooklynization of culture killed regional music scenes.

On Ilya Zhitomirskiy, an idealistic young developer who committed suicide 18 months after founding Diaspora, his well-publicized, open-source alternative to Facebook.

How the author of Friday Night Lights spent more than half a million dollars over three years on “eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves.”

Inside the most sensational murder in the history of study abroad.

New research upends ideas about culture’s impact on how our brains our wired.

On a little-known statistic that tracks the movement of America’s population by searching for its balance point.

How the Ovitzs, a family of Jewish dwarves from Transylvania, survived Auschwitz.

Aaron Greene and Morgan Gliedman were young and in love and pregnant and partial to heroin and living in a Village apartment with a lot of heavy weaponry lying about. Then they were arrested, and their stories started to change.

On the skyrocketing number of Americans on disability—14 million at last count, with payouts topping those for food stamps and welfare combined—and what it means for the U.S. economy.

After watching his father Sandy abuse his paralyzed former-jockey mother for years, Mat Crichton committed murder. Nearly the entire local farming community rallied in support of him.

How a longtime gambling addict and a small band of his cronies manipulated both the game and betting exchanges from a tiny Berlin cafe, going as far as buying ownerships of teams in order to insure their failure.

Robert Berman was a passionate and polarizing English teacher at the Horace Mann School. He is also accused of sexually abusing many of his devoted students.

Life as a human cannonball.