Longform

On Sam Cooke, theme parties, and the importance of McDonald’s-related jingles when street performing.

Money from relatives abroad, the lifeline for many Afghani’s, moves primarily through small hawala</em exchanges, which shift currency through cellphones, fax lines, and trust. When money moves in Afghanistan, however, connections to the heroin trade and terrorist groups are never far.

A primer on Egypt’s political landscape.

The Bohemian Grove is an exclusive, all-male club made up of Presidents, ambassadors, and other world leaders, with a 33 year waiting list for membership. Their booze-soaked annual retreat outside of San Francisco had never been infiltrated—until this story.

On the language of hobos and the dictionaries it spawned.

The story of Nate Fleming—walk-on point guard at Oklahoma State, fan favorite, golden child—and the 2001 plane crash that took his life.

A remembrance of relationships formed when the author, at 13 and using a false identity, frequented hockey chat rooms.

In 1998, at age 45, Ken Bradshaw surfed the tallest wave in recorded history.

What happened when the founder of North Face and Esprit bought a chunk of Chile the size of a small state, intending to live with a select group inside it and turn it case study for ecological preservation. It turned out, however, that Chileans didn’t really like that idea.

Paul Wayment made a profound mistake, left his 2-year-old son alone in his truck as he tracked deer in the wilderness. The boy was gone when he returned. The story of a collective struggle to find a just punishment.

On the cloak and dagger dealings between The New York Times and WikiLeaks. Adapted from Executive Editor Bill Keller’s forthcoming ebook, Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Updated Coverage from The New York Times.

On the pair of entrepreneurs behind a Wal-Mart of weed in Oakland. The duo is talking IPO. “Everybody I was meeting was a little bit older, more a part of the hippie generation,” says one. “I was like, ‘I bet there’s so much room for innovation and new ideas.’”

What has Ted Haggard, who left the New Life megachurch after admitting he purchased crystal meth and sexual favors from a male escort, been doing in the four years since? Selling insurance door to door and then… founding a new church and returning to the pulpit.

A primer on Peretz, longtime owner/editor of The New Republic, committed Zionist, and author of the line “Muslim life is cheap.”

Lockheed Martin is the largest government contractor in history. They train TSA workers and Guantanamo interrogators. Every American household pays them around $260 per year in taxes. The new military industrial complex is a single company.

Is long-term solitary confinement torture?

J.D. Salinger on the beaches on D-Day, marching through concentration camps, and in liberated Paris.

A profile of the late Jack LaLanne, “the greatest gym teacher of all time,” who was as responsible as anyone for America’s fitness craze in the latter half of the 20th century.

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

Nobody loved chimpanzees more than St. James Davis and his wife LaDonna; the couple spent more than 30 years—and gained a modicum of fame—raising one as their son. Then they almost died in a brutal chimp attack.

Searching for (and easily finding) Mark Augustus Landis, the man behind the “longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known.”

On the illusion of the inevitable and the revolutions that ended the Eastern Bloc.

Most military experts agree that robots, not people, will inevitably do the fighting in ground wars. In Tennessee, a high-end gunsmith is already there. The story of Jerry Baber and his robot army.

“For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has a political party that is ideologically cohesive, disciplined, and determined to take power, even at the cost of disrupting the political system.”

How health care reform could be repealed.