Longform

Learning from the upheaval of the 1930s.

How is it that literature has produced a wealth of information about the sex lives of straight white men and yet so little about the abortions they have or have not paid for?

Behind the scenes, a small team of FBI agents spent years trying to solve a stubborn mystery — whether officials from Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s closest allies, were involved in the worst terror attack in U.S. history. This is their story.

The discovery of a legendary, lost shipwreck in North America has pitted treasure hunters and archaeologists against each other, raising questions about who should control sunken riches.

A jailhouse interview with Steve Washak, who made millions selling “natural male enhancement” pills.

After sitting alone in a forest and not moving for 24 hours, the author reflects on time, mortality, and turning 40.

Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?

Surviving sexual assault in a rapidly digitized world.

Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America.

For months, Emile Weaver denied her pregnancy. A gruesome discovery forced her to confront the truth.

In January 2000, American Pyscho bombed at Sundance. It was just the beginning.

“What I learned about masculinity from my father, my father-in-law and my own transition.”

What could the political effects be of a media that actually served working-class Americans?

How the Ebola outbreak spread.

We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift.

The fight to save an innocent refugee from almost certain death.

Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs.

On the shared life of Tatiana and Krista Hogan:

The girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

An encounter with Emerson’s essays.

What links an eccentric Oxford classics don, billionaire US evangelicals, and a tiny, missing fragment of an ancient manuscript?

Rio de Janeiro drug gangs are embracing evangelical Christianity.

When a writer’s husband became violent, her career threatened to vanish along with her safety.

A year of reporting reveals a culture of incest, rape, and abuse.

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a 
gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.