Longform

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.

This isn't an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don't want to lie.

A survey of sex on a Saturday night in New York City.

An exposé of extralegal killing.

A profile of actress Christina Ricci.

When the Rolling Stones played Altamont.

A profile of the actress and screenwriter.

How the former Bush advisor is “reengineering the practice of partisan money management in hopes of drumming Barack Obama out of the White House.”

The rise and fall of an antiquities collector turned grave robber.

The secret is an exclusive 22-year-old archive of viewer-submitted clips.

Bill Ferguson does not believe his son, Ryan, killed a popular newspaper editor. To prove it, he’s drained his savings, performed public re-enactments of the crime, and alienated almost everyone in his Missouri city.

On the scene of the darkest games in Olympics history.

Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.

The frenzied few days before the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

A radical new treatment for auditory hallucinations.

How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?

Two men named Nathan committed murders. Only one received a death sentence.