On Billy Joel’s sardonic gloom.

The story of one of the 74,000 children who come to this country each year alone and undocumented.

The battle over a New York Picasso.

A profile of the highest-paid female executive in America, who was born male.

Inside the fast-food labor protests.

How New York real estate became the new Swiss bank account.

The gangs of Brooklyn’s Brownsville, an area with the higest concentration of public housing in America.

Shamir is 15, bored and broke and balancing right on the edge.

A profile of DJ Larry Levan, whose sets at New York’s Paradise Garage in the 80s had an almost religious appeal.

Robert Aaron was a veteran horn player who sold bags of heroin to friends to support his own habit. Then his friend Philip Seymour Hoffman overdosed.

Scenes from a Bowery flophouse.

On the life and death of Avonte Oquendo, a 14-year-old autistic boy who disappeared in October after walking out of his New York City school.

Previously: Robert Kolker on the Longform Podcast.

Memories of the old neighborhood, before everything changed.

A profile of former club kid Michael Alig, who is approaching release after serving 17 years in jail for murder.

The riotous private sector life of former New York senator, Al D’Amato.

Notes from a Black Panther fundraiser on Park Avenue.

Exploring the vast underground world of New York City with three of the people who know it best.

The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

“They cruise the city in chauffeured cars, blasting rap, selling pot to classmates. How some of New York’s richest kids joined forces with some of its poorest.”

“Will you show me all of the man-in-the-street, sympathetic, mayoral candidates? The last time I met one of them on the subway was a long time ago. Let’s not get too carried away.”

How New York City built its own CIA.

A terminally ill young woman arrives in New York to spend her last months.

"Outside, the spring wind rippled the silk across Sabrina’s skin and as she tilted her face up, the sun drew freckles across her nose and cheeks. She felt lighter than she had in weeks. It had been a strange irony that even as she was losing weight, she’d felt leaden; it was the loss of energy, of course, but it was more than that, too. It was as if the knowledge inside her was quantifiable, which meant it was diminishable, too. She hadn’t wanted to hand pieces of her diagnosis to those she knew, those she loved—but what a relief to give a sliver of it away."

What kind of New York is Mayor Mike leaving behind?

The benefits of getting sick in New York.

“Morning and night the hordes of clerks and stenographers and business men who fill the offices of down-town New York have poured across Newspaper Row and City Hall Park with scarcely a glance at the labor progressing underfoot that is going to bring them so many minutes nearer their work in the morning, and at night so many minutes nearer their play.”