“If 4chan sounds trivial, that’s because it is. The site certainly doesn’t make much money…In fact, you could say that 4chan has cornered the market on the trivial on the Internet, which is no small feat (the trivial usually spreads by accident on the Web, according to no logic).”

When they met, he was 45 and she was 17. In her 14 years as his mistress, she appeared in countless paintings, including Guernica.

On a decade-long war:

Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits.

With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.

A profile of Judy Clarke, the publicity-shy anti-death-penalty attorney, who has defended the Unabomber, Susan Smith, and Jared Loughner.

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.

After one of the most decisive wins in Kentucky Derby history, Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, ending a promising career and beginning a herculean effort to save his life.

The lonesome death of Arnold Rothstein, notorious gambler, inspiration for the character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, alleged fixer of the 1910 World Series, opiate importation pioneer, mobster.

The cop says she nabbed an online sexual predator. He says he was just willing to chat whatever it took to get laid in real life. Their story, from both perspectives.

At a South Korean laboratory, a once-disgraced doctor is replicating hundreds of deceased pets for the rich and famous.

Pope Benedict XVI’s post-retirement presence in the Vatican has set the stage for a conflict that threatens to split the Catholic Church into two.

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

The fall of billionaire Henry Nicholas, co-founder and CEO of microchip-maker Broadcom, who lost his job and his marriage amidst allegations of drug use, cooking the books, and building a secret party lair beneath the house he shared with family.

The diarist and photographer Peter Beard, known both for his series documenting a mass elephant starvation and for discovering the supermodel Iman on a Nairobi street, reflects on his life of “drugs, debt, and beautiful women” while recovering from being trampled by an elephant.

“We can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money.”

How Harper Lee was duped into signing away the rights to To Kill a Mockingbird, which still sells 750,000 copies per year, and how she’s fighting to get them back.

The whole thing began over a puddle in the driveway. Eight years later, Peter Nygard and his neighbor Louis Bacon, who own houses next to each other in paradise, have spent tens of millions in a constantly escalating legal war. Neither man spends much time on the island anymore.

The murder of an Iranian band in Brooklyn by one of their own.

Previously: Nancy Jo Sales on the Longform Podcast.

A profile Mark Pincus, the founder and C.E.O. of Zynga—the company that created FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker game in the world.

As China’s growing upper class has pushed the price of ivory above $700/pound, a look at both the supply and demand side of the global trade in (mostly) illicitly acquired elephant tusks.

An interview with Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone writer Vanessa Grigoriadis on the finer points of celebrity profiling.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

The author wanted to give up her day job but keep her lifestyle. So she turned to Seeking Arrangement, a site that pairs rich, older men interested in “companionship” with 20-somethings interested in “gifts.”