Longform

Zaranj: the bloody border of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back.”

The former chancellor of New York City schools was not, in fact, “a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.”

On hypochondria.

On the Clintons’ political future.

The Drugstore Cowboy star candidly discusses the characters who defined her career.

A profile of Jeremy Lin.

An impossible hike in Western China.

“For every other kid in the room, the science experiment probably amounts to just another classroom activity, but for the Nashes the project is a reminder of Molly’s own fight for life and the controversial cutting-edge medicine that saved her.”

On Queens’ stubbornly unchanging Roosevelt Avenue, where immigrants pay $2 a song to grind against hired dancers and shuttered houses of prostitution have given way to rolling brothel-vans.

A profile of Montana Senator Jon Tester.

How a high-speed rail disaster exposed China’s corruption.

I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it.

The tragi-comic career of a nobody comedian from the 1940s who ditched his wife, child, and eventually his own name.

Captain Iván Castro, who lost his vision in Iraq, runs the Boston Marathon.

How Barack Obama decided to green-light the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

An argument for outing a notorious message board member: “Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit’s role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women. I am OK with that.”

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian launches an ambitious campaign.

A strange, ongoing property battle among the richest of Texans.

How a couple made millions on uncanny forgeries.

The last men who ride the rails, “where silence and lawlessness still reign.”