Longform

Why utopias are best understood as fiction games, and how they quickly become dystopias when realized.

Investigating the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we.

The story of Dean Corll and his accomplices, who killed over 20 teenage boys in the Heights neighborhood of Houston in the early 1970s, and the families searching for their missing sons.

The underage prostitution study that was cited extensively in the congressional hearings that resulted in the removal of Craigslist’s Erotic Services turns out to be the work of a for-hire business consulting firm and, scientifically, completely bogus.

The closest thing that the international network of hackers Anonymous has to an organizer lives in a 378 sq. ft apartment in Dallas and, at the time of this interview, was on his fourth day of opiate withdrawal.

A story written about Twitter and one its founders, Evan Williams, when the company’s chief source of revenue was subletting desks in their partially filled office.

A profile of computational biologist Eric Schadt, the guy who’s figuring out what comes next after the Human Genome Project.

A 12,000-word profile of recently departed Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva, the “most successful politician of his time.”

On Elizabeth Taylor at the height of her fame.

In the 1880’s, a shabbily dressed man popped up in numerous America cities, calling upon local scientists, showing letters of introduction claiming he was a noted geologist or paleontologist, discussing both fields at a staggeringly accomplished level, and then making off with valuable books or cash loans.

Immigrant farmers are flocking to the poultry industry – only to become 21st-century sharecroppers for companies like Tyson.

A profile of Sabrina Harman, the soldier who took many of the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs.

In January 2009, a U.S. platoon came under rocket attack in Iraq. Two years later, how the event changed the soldiers’ lives.

Sasha Shulgin, a former DOW chemist who now lives a quiet life as a pensioner outside the Bay Area, is responsible for the discovery of the majority of psychedelic compounds currently known.

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace.

In the late ’80s, Lewis went to Japan to research a hypothetical: what would the economic fallout be if a major quake hit?

A conversation on the Times Square of the ’50s and ’60s.

On Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

After the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Ring Lardner, America’s first great sportswriter, walked away from the game.

On the mysterious relationship between a major New York State power broker and a Brooklyn family. “The Turanos are variously described by friends, neighbors and colleagues as the senator’s social acquaintances, lovers or surrogate relatives.”

The swinging life and boozy death of the original ladies man, and the story of “the coroner that tampered with his cold, lifeless venereal warts.”

On the ground in post-disaster Japan.

On the many lives and careers of Owsley Stanley (1935-2011), chemist, sound design innovator, and outback jeweler, whose name appears in the OED as a synonym for “a particularly pure form of LSD.”