Longform

The Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, drawn mostly from kidnapped children, has proved as elusive as it is barbaric.

In 2006, seven men stole £53m. Six were caught, but more than half the money remains at large. On modern money laundering best practices.

On 30 years of Long Island politics.

How the Weinstein Brothers barked their way into an empire and then lost it.

How an Iraqi expat conned the United States, without ever once being interviewed by an American official, into making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. “Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq.”

“If genius is hard to define, madness is even more so.” One chess champion’s take on the tortured life of another.

The abridged history of a Brooklyn culture war.

The story of H1N1 and one of the lives it claimed.

On the dilemmas facing a (very famous) working mother in New York City. “It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam—which, let me make it very clear, I have not done—than it is to speak honestly about this topic.”

How J.C. Penney gamed Google and became the top result for searches on everything from “area rugs” to “skinny jeans.”

The father: an Oscar-winning songwriter. The son, a college dropout and partier around downtown New York. Their alleged crimes; serial casting-couch rape (the senior) and a drowning murder in a Soho House bathtub (the junior).

“You’re either with Korn and Limp Bizkit, or you’re against them.” The birth of nu-metal.

A look at the legislative lobbying efforts of Michael Bloomberg’s $7 billion-per-year company. While the mayor has no specific day-to-day role at Bloomberg LP, he maintains “the type of involvement that he believes is consistent with his being the majority shareholder.”

How a Nigerian-American conned upwards of $40 million from banks during the housing boom using publicly available information from the internet, persuasive storytelling, and prepaid cellphones, and then ditched his FBI tail in a casino.

The story of three months spent training reporters in Saudi Arabia, where the press is far from free. “I suspected that behind the closed gates of Saudi society there was a social revolution in the making. With some guidance, I thought, these journalists could help inspire change.”

Brooklyn, Illinois has one of the most dense clusters of strip clubs and rubdown parlors in the entire country, drawing patrons from nearby St. Louis and its suburbs. Inside the clubs with the dancers, a strip club scholar, the mayor, and the regulars whose dollars keep the depressed local economy afloat.

When Conan O’Brien left NBC, he agreed to stay off TV for months and stay quiet about the network and its executives. The agreement contained no mention of social media, however. On the origins of a digital renaissance.

An opinion piece on the structural causes of unrest in Egypt; the business fraternity, globalization, and the fate of Egyptian women.

On the enduring racial segregation in Chicago and why it’s an issue no mayoral candidate is willing to touch.

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity; when will our minds meld with the machine?

A profile of Vova Galchenko, teenage juggling virtuoso and early viral star.

On the Cairo knifing of 82-year-old Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and its aftermath.

On Mark Twain’s recently released memoir.

A primer on income inequality in America.

A profile of Republican Eric Cantor: six-term congressman, new House majority leader, highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history.