Longform

In 2005, the prisoner who had set the U.S. penal system record for years in solitary confinement was moved to what’s called “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”—a jail in Colorado built just for him.

A woman is clogging the Lehigh County court system with divorce filings against David Lee Roth and there is nothing the legal system can do to stop her.

An excerpt from Night of the Gun, the memoir by New York Times media critic David Carr about his years as a junkie in late-‘80s Minneapolis.

Over a scotch a few months after his underdog Jets won Super Bowl III, a 26-year-old Joe Namath told Jimmy Breslin what he’d done the night before the game: “I went out and got a bottle and grabbed this girl.”

The inner workings of a surprisingly amiable Holocaust denial conference.

A profile of the mysterious and moderately intelligent Giant Pacific Octopus.

Yeah, you’ve seen that headline before. The difference? This time it’s not journalists trying to do the saving. It’s Google.

Inside the twisted, half-conscious world of Jure Robic, the Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete.

How HBO went from sitcoms starring Delta Burke and O.J. Simpson to The Wire. The view from a former HBO employee who witnessed the channel’s rise to prominence firsthand.

The eighteen-year-old Moscow dropout behind chatroulette.com.

An excerpt from Zak Smith’s We Did Porn detailing an appearance by porn star Sasha Grey on The Tyra Banks Show.

Tadashi Yanai (“he is like Warren Buffett in Japan”) takes his Uniqlo brand stateside.

How an alcoholic doctor simultaneously saved his own life and made what could be the medical breakthrough of the century.

The truck driver who reverse engineered the atomic bomb.

On the day of the earthquake, two men went into Haiti’s Soccer Federation headquarters. Only one came out.

How do you handle an infestation when you live on the Upper East Side and bedbugs could hurt the value of your apartment? With discretion.

From Hong Kong to Bangkok to the Golden Triangle, the author searches for something everyone says no longer exists: an opium den.

In 2008, a Brooklyn cop grew gravely concerned about how the public was being served. So he began carrying a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.

The struggle behind the making of Terence Malick’s first movie in twenty years and the two producers who, depending on your source, either made it possible or nearly ruined it.

The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism.

Karaoke renditions of ‘My Way’ have led to murders in the Phillipines.

The Columbia shuttle was to be a revolution for NASA. But a year before its first launch, the shuttle was several years behind schedule, had cost $1 billion, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever get off the ground.

A weekend at a Christian gay-to-straight sexual reorientation retreat.

An uneasy friendship forms in colonial Ceylon between the future husband of Virgina Woolf and a socially repulsive police magistrate.

How did a pair of young rappers from Scotland, laughed off the stage for their accents, land a deal with Sony and start partying with Madonna? They pretended to be American.