In high school, I started to become like a local legend. A hood celebrity, if you will. And you really gotta understand how poppin’ New York City basketball was at that time. I’m playing against Stephon Marbury, Skip 2 My Lou, Alimoe (rest in peace), all these guys who would become household names, they were just kids from around the way. Man, even Cam’ron was super nice!!!

I knew all these guys from when we was little kids playing church basketball, and now all of a sudden we got Jay-Z, Puff, Dame Dash — all these guys are showing up to our games. That’s how insane New York City basketball was at that time.

On the unlikely survival (for the second time) of Kamaishi, Japan.

A prescient take on what the US invasion of Iraq would mean for both countries.

Thousands of internal documents help explain how, through brutality and bureaucracy, the Islamic State stayed in power for so long.

The passengers of the Diamond Princess came for indulgence, relaxation and bottomless buffets. Then they found themselves trapped on a ship infected with a deadly virus.

In 2005, the prisoner who had set the U.S. penal system record for years in solitary confinement was moved to what’s called “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”—a jail in Colorado built just for him.

The humanitarian crisis the rest of the world has already forgotten about.

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

The rise and fall of Intrade, the betting market for world events—elections, hurricanes, Academy Awards—and the death of its CEO near the top of Everest.

In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.

Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.

Al Sharpton wanted to be a civil rights leader in the mold of Martin Luther King, Jr. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

The government says Matt DeHart is an online child predator. DeHart—and his parents—say he’s being framed over his knowledge of CIA secrets.

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

A newly minted, 34-year-old White House budget director gets a little too candid with a reporter profiling him during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. Among Stockman’s many admissions: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

From “Idiocracy” to “Silicon Valley,” the writer and director has established himself as America’s foremost chronicler of its own self-destructive tendencies.

At 90 years old, Lawrence Hill’s mother was ready to end it all on her own terms, but Canada’s assisted-dying law was too strict to allow that.

In Aug. 2008, the U.S. military called in an airstrike on its own security guards in Afghanistan. Dozens of children were killed.

As the city is transformed by gentrification and inequality, comedies have begun depicting it as a place of magical connection.

When a Qatari sheikh came to live in L.A., an entire economy sprouted to meet his wishes. “His highness doesn’t like to hear no,” one associate told a professor.

A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.

Three years after a devastating wildfire, a California community faces another crisis: PTSD. Is what’s happening there a warning to the rest of us?

Many people dream of building their own home in the country, but one family finds more of a struggle than they bargained for.

When a Chinese billionaire bought one of Britain’s most prestigious golf clubs in 2015, dentists and estate agents were confronted with the unsentimental force of globalized capital.

On those rare instances when I would think about having a child, I assumed her life would be less complicated than my own. The stubborn optimism of the immigrant dictates that while your own life often shows just how quickly things can get catastrophically worse, American progress remains immutable.

An essay on how we misremember our youth.