“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

His health failing and his business in tatters, the head of Death Row Records faces murder charges that could put him away for life.

A son goes to visit his dying father.

For a daily short story recommendation from our editors, try Longform Fiction or follow @longformfiction on Twitter.

What if soldiers from ‘Kill Team’ (and others who have murdered innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq) aren’t simply the “few bad apples” that military writes them off as?

Most people think they’d be thrilled to have their memoir snapped up for a movie. The author had a different, more troubled experience.

A secretive hedge fund used the British court system to punish an IP thief‚ even though he was already in jail.

The U.S. had been his home since he was 6 months old. When he was deported 
to Mexico 26 years later, it was more than he could bear.

George Floyd’s killing galvanized a nation. But small groups like the queer-led collective Black Visions are channeling that energy into a movement for political change.

She fabricated harrowing personal backstories, peddled gross caricatures, and spoke from perspectives she had no right to claim. And nobody stopped her.

The debate over what really killed the dinosaurs is still raging.

The Aziz Ansari controversy was just the beginning of the trouble for the website.

Interviews with modern travelling salesmen. The article inspired Kirn’s novel Up in the Air.

What makes this a truly military culture, besides its overwhelming maleness, its air of emotional deprivation and the lousy rations, is its obsession with rank and hierarchy. Like jungle gorillas, business travelers always know where they stand versus the rest of the group. In this parallel universe of upgrade vouchers and priority-boarding privileges, everyone has a number and a position, and who gets that open aisle seat in first class means even more on the road then who earns what.

Why the world is becoming less free.

The cover story from the June 2011 print edition of The New Republic, available on the web specially for readers of Longform.org.

The reverberations of an avalanche.

Tom Catena is the only surgeon for thousands of square miles in Southern Sudan. His hospital, and his life, are constantly under threat. There is no end to the carnage he must treat. He refuses to leave.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

The legacy of Benihana.

Mary Bacon took a bullet while pilfering fruit as a child. Mary Bacon dropped out of school in the sixth grade and was pregnant by age 16. Mary Bacon had a romantic relationship with Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Mary Bacon was kidnapped by a stalker. That same stalker later tried to shoot her with a gun. Not all of those sentences are complete horseshit.

Spun-off from Time Warner and saddled with $1.3 billion in debt as a parting gift, the once-mighty Time Inc needs to reinvent itself. Fast.

A woman travels with a band on the way to their next show.

On the writers, poets and beats in a reclusive California town, where residents repeatedly tear down highway signs indicating its location.

On Dylan Yount, a man who jumped from a San Francisco building, and the people who watched, recorded and, in some cases, encouraged his suicide.

Two years ago, the fitness guru abruptly disappeared from public life. His friends worry that he’s being held against his will inside his Hollywood Hills mansion, or something even worse.

Microprocessors cost billions to develop. They take three times longer to build than an airplane, in an environment 1,000 times more sterile than a hospital. Throughout the entire process, nobody ever touches them.