Longform

Adventures in something called “Radical Honesty.”

A 1988 profile of Bill Murray, then at the peak of his box office power and living in a secluded farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley.

Ty Cobb, who would go on to be the greatest baseball player of his time, was a 17-year-old minor league prospect when his mother shot and killed his father at home in Georgia.

Are video games capable of emotion?

Saad Mohseni, Afghanistan’s first media mogul and a business partner of Rupert Murdoch, produces everything from nightly news broadcasts to the controversial Afghan version of American Idol.

75 years after its founding, it’s still hard to explain exactly why Alcoholics Anonymous works.

How an L.A. high school dropout became an enforcer for Mexican cartels and ended up on the F.B.I. Most Wanted List.

An unidentified body found near the beach in Australia in 1948. An unclaimed suitcase. A coded note.

For the members of UCLA’s undocumented immigrant club, going to school means fighting for an education most students take for granted.

The story of the most popular music video of all time, including memories of a then-25-year-old Michael Jackson on and off the set. Director John Landis: “I dealt with Michael as I would have a really gifted child.”

When Japanese men in their teens and twenties shut themselves in their rooms, sometimes for a period of years, one way to lure them out is a hired “big sister.”

One of the founders of Google discovered that he carried a gene that meant a 50% chance of developing Parkinson’s. In response, he is working to change and expedite the way that Parkinson’s research is conducted.

Will we deplete the worldwide Bluefin Tuna population beyond repair?

A Dutch traffic engineer showed that streets without signs are safer than those cluttered with arrows, painted lines, and lights.

How Warren Beatty seduced the studios into making the comedy Ishtar, which set the modern bar for cinematic debacles. (An excerpt from Peter Biskind’s Star.)

Clay Shirky, writing in 1999 on the Web eclipsing TV’s reach: “We will always have massive media, but the days of mass media are over, killed by the explosion of possibility and torn into a thousand niches.”

“Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.”

The rise and fall of Design Within Reach.

Is Mike Huckabee the GOP’s best hope in 2012? Mike Huckabee’s not so sure.

The importance of the sports metaphor in the American consciousness and why Lewis Lapham didn’t join the C.I.A.

Carl Malamud is on a quest to change the way average citizens can interface with the government – by scanning its paperwork and making it available free online. And he’s financing his effort with his own credit cards.

An hour-by-hour account of the explosion and rescue effort on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

After a racial hazing incident, the first black head of South Africa’s University of Free State confronts the myths of the reconciliation era.

A woman posing as a non-profit worker kidnaps a formerly homeless pregnant woman and tries to claim her baby. [PART 2]

A woman posing as a non-profit worker kidnaps a formerly homeless pregnant woman and tries to claim her baby. [PART 1]