Longform

On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.

The international battle over 17 tons of coins discovered by an American deep-sea treasure hunting company.

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

On the shifting nature of time.

Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the radical activist “beyond the leading edge” of the same-sex marriage fight.

The story of Christopher and Jeffrey George, the twin proprietors of a pain clinic empire.

John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed.

A decade-long Internet hoax unravels.

A trip to Disneyland in the mid-1960s.

Previously posted on Longform.org on January 25th, 2012.

How Google’s utopian/dystopian plan to scan the world’s books failed and the Harvard-led team that’s picking up the pieces.

The Horace Mann School’s secret history of sexual abuse.

An ode to professional basketball players and why pro ball is the best ball of all.

“Strong-arm methods, including murder, are common in the illicit narcotics traffic. After a major international narcotics ring was broken up last year, two of the- twenty-four defendants were murdered before completion of the trial. One was shot down in the Bronx; the burned body of the other was found near Rochester, New York. The business executive, factory worker, and housewife never encounter the seamy side, but this is what their bets are financing. Again I ask, Is this really the way the American people want it to be?”

Teaching Ted Kaczynski’s anti-technology ideas.

The Penn State sex abuse scandal as told through a father, a son and “Victim 1.”

“Jon Corzine had never had anything to do with the futures business, had never run a public company, and hadn’t worked on Wall Street for a decade. His time there had ended badly. But by any reasonable standard, the former Goldman chief seemed almost embarrassingly overqualified. Says Flowers: ‘It seemed like we had more CEO than company.’”

The history of American whaling.

A profile of Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka Sabu, a hacker star of Anonymous and resident of a New York City housing project.

She was a thirteen-year-old from the Chabad Lubavitch community who would dip into a barbershop bathroom to swap her orthodox clothes for those of a streetwalker. Her pimping and rape allegations against a group of black men in their twenties, repeatedly recanted and then reaffirmed, would send the D.A.’s office into disarray.

A profile of fashion designer Nudie Cohn, who made clothing for Elvis, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, and others.

A profile of the Against Me! frontman.

The untold story of steroids in baseball.

Uncovered letters reveal ties between the literary magazine and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The controversy surrounding the death of Uche Okafor.