A trip to the Famous Poets Society convention/contest in Reno.

When deep sea diver Dave Shaw reached the bottom of Bushman’s Hole, he discovered the body of Deon Dreyer. Though Dreyer had been gone for 10 years, Shaw was determined to bring him back.

A profile of the singer as he returns to the stage for the first time in a dozen years.

The rise of anonymous group suicide in Japan.

On Johnny Carson, a cold man in a hot seat.

Tracking a rumored gerbil infestation through China’s bureaucracy.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu project began in 1960 and was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. It didn't go that way.

Update: The software was finally, quietly released in April.

A profile of the Los Angeles Clippers owner, an oft-sued real estate baron with a documented racist streak and a penchant for heckling his own players, on the occasion of him winning an NAACP lifetime achievement award.

The use and abuse of civil forfeiture.

After a botched bank robbery in 1990, Sture Bergwall, aka Thomas Quick, confessed to a string of brutal crimes. He admitted to stabbings, stranglings, incest and cannibalism. He was convicted of eight murders in all, and after the final trial he went silent for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, Bergwall came forward again—there was one more secret he had to tell.

Cycles of boom and bust in the drilling town of Williston, N.D., as seen from the perspective of an itinerant dancer filling one of three slots at the only strip club in town, Whispers.

From a Tokyo smash-and-grab to driving a car through the window of a Dubai jewelry shop, how a ragtag band of Balkan thieves set a new bar for audacious heists.

A member of the Pink Panthers, Milan Poparic, escaped from prison yesterday.

The hunt for a secretive network of British men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

Riding along on the Lunch Express.

The rise and fall and rise of Hill flack Kurt Bardella, and what it says about D.C. culture.

How Robert Gottlieb quelled a rebellion and saved The New Yorker.

Note: Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

How a secretive Israel billionaire seized control of an untapped iron ore deposit beneath one of Africa’s poorest countries.

How one driver can break a bottleneck.

She was Becky Sue Turner, then Lori Erica Ruff. Now she’s Jane Doe.

Seven years after being fired from The Replacements, their founding guitarist is an thirty-three-year-old unemployed line cook living amongst memories in Minneapolis. He would be dead within two years.

High school debate and the demise of public speech.

On an artist who’s spent nearly 50 years bending the rules of space and light, and his life’s work, an extinct volcano in Arizona where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974.

"I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z."

What the bountiful sex lives of bonobos—they enjoy deep kissing, oral sex, dry humping, and polyamory—can teach us about humanity.

In Ramapo, New York, the immigrant community and the growing population of Hasidic Jews had eyed each increasing wariness for years. Then the Hasidim took over the public schools, schools their children do not attend, and proceeded to gut them.