Longform

What the health care industry can learn from how The Cheesecake Factory does business.

On Enrique of Malacca, “the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.”

On distance running and the art of exhaustion.

What one woman spends in a year.

No, but for security software companies it’s a useful fiction.

In a posthumously published essay, Twain recounts dreams of a long-lost love.

In the late 90s, an American man adopted a 5-year-old from the Ukraine. A decade later, one of the two would be accused of molesting young boys. The other would be charged with murder.

A profile of “not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America.”

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

The underground routes by which drugs enter the U.S. from Mexico, and the officials who’ve found it almost impossible to curb their construction.

A look back at the 2008 raid on Warren Jeffs’ polygamous Mormon sect.

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

Vidal on Midge Decter, homophobia and a proposed alliance between Jews and gays.

Welcome to Plasenzuela, whose 500 inhabitants enjoyed no-show jobs, spent millions on phantom projects and defrauded Social Security.

Creators, gatekeepers, and the future of the comedy business.

A transcript of Oswalt’s keynote at last week’s Just For Laughs conference.

The looming collapse of agriculture on the Great Plains.

On the uneasy relationship between magic and medicine.

On the legal history of LSD in America and a researcher who never gave up on the drug’s promise.

INTERVIEWER: You once said the novel is dead. VIDAL: That was a joke.

Adam Wheeler lied on his college application. Lawrence Summers facilitated the destruction of the global economy.

Only one of these Harvard men was given jail time.

“Transforming into an Administrative Jekyll for a certain amount of time every day limits the amount of time my Creative Hyde can come up with content to market and sell. Luckily, amphetamines have that problem tackled as well: when you’re using them, you don’t have to sleep… at all.”

The history of the City of London Corporation, a “prehistoric monster which had mysteriously survived into the modern world.”

When U.S. customs law met abstract art in the form of a bird, “shimmering and soaring toward the ceiling while the lawyers debated whether it was an ‘original sculpture’ or a metal ‘article or ware not specially provided for’ under the 1922 Tariff Act.”

The emotional toll on drone pilots.