Longform

Tennessee’s sick and dying coal ash cleanup workers fight for their lives.

Giving birth as a black woman in America.

Inside the Trump 2020 campaign.

Each year, California’s child protective services agencies remove thousands of kids from their homes. The story of how some parents decided to fight back.

Obinwanne Okeke was supposed to be a rags-to-riches Nigerian success story, was even featured on the cover of Forbes. Then the feds followed the money.

Groups protesting lockdown measures see the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for tyranny—and as an opportunity for spreading rage.

All you need is a blueprint, a polymer, a printer, and a knowledge of government regulations.

How the USPS works.

Cesar Sayoc turned his loyalty toward Donald Trump into a literal assault on the President’s Democratic enemies in 2018.

From 1968-1973, the three teenage Wiggin sisters, guided by a domineering father, played their strange music at New Hampshire ballrooms and recorded a single album. The Philosophy of the World LP goes for over $500 today, but the intervening decades have not been kind to the Wiggins.

On Jared Kushner and his relationship with his father-in-law.

An encounter with a bear opens a strange world of self-discovery.

The case for paying college athletes.

In their depictions of domination, the artist’s works, full of world-building and philosophy, do more than flip the script.

The rise and fall of Quayside, a futuristic city concept that Google’s Sidewalk Labs planned to build in neglected part of Toronto.

The role of money plays a two-sided role in Borges’ artistic life. On one side of the coin’s face, Borges was blessed with the most privileged, ideal life for a burgeoning literary genius. Educated in Europe, raised by his father to become a serious writer, Borges devoted his entire life to literature. He did not take a full-time job for nearly 40 years. But on the coin’s reverse side, we see that young Georgie Borges did not actually write his great fictions until after his family lost their money.

Every year eleven million people attend Magh Mela, a Hindu festival on the banks of the Ganges. The temporary infrastructure to support them includes hospitals and power stations, plus a massive surveillance apparatus.

The ads are everywhere. You can learn to serve like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But what MasterClass really delivers is something altogether different.

A look at Chicago’s DJ culture in the ’90s.

One day in 1997, Sneak promised his friend and fellow Chicago DJ Derrick Carter a new 12-inch for Carter's label Classic, then spent hours fruitlessly laboring over a basic, bustling four-four beat. Finally, Sneak gave in and smoked the J he'd had stashed for later in the day. When he came back inside, he carelessly dropped the needle onto a Teddy Pendergrass LP, heard the word "Well . . . ," and realized, "That's the sample, right there." He threaded Pendergrass's 20-year-old disco hit "You Can't Hide From Yourself" through a low-pass filter to give it the effect of going in and out of aural focus, creating one of the definitive Chicago house singles.

“What people need to know is we’re not protesting churches. We’re protesting this church.”

If something isn’t done now, antibiotic-resistant bacteria could kill as many as 10 million people a year by 2050.

Decades ago, a marketing stunt promised Philippine soda drinkers a chance at a million pesos. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winners—and to lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths.

As rural Wisconsin’s fortunes have declined, its political importance has grown.

What is it like when a city abandons a neighborhood and the police vanish? Business owners describe a harrowing experience of calling for help and being left all alone.