In Hollywood’s new blockbuster economy, the actors who portray superheroes are as interchangeable as the costumes they wear.

On the post-prison lives of several men in West Baltimore.

The fight to grant asylum to the translators who worked—and sometimes fought—alongside U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A profile of 21-year-old Dan Cates, who made $5.5 million playing 145,215 hands in 2010.

In 1991, Frank Sterling confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. His story highlights a common – and controversial – method of police interrogation.

An investigation into the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Alaska Native villages.

An investigation into rising crime rates in small American cities. Is a lauded antipoverty program to blame?

By 2006, S&P was making its own study of such loans' performance. It singled out 639,981 loans made in 2002 to see if its benign assumptions had held up. They hadn't. Loans with piggybacks were 43% more likely to default than other loans, S&P found. In April 2006, S&P said it would raise by July the amount of collateral underwriters must include in many new mortgage portfolios. For instance, S&P could require that mortgage pools have extra loans in them, since it now expected a larger number to go bad. Still, S&P didn't lower its ratings on existing securities, saying it had to further monitor the performance of loans backing them. It thus helped the market for these loans hold up through the end of 2006.

On 20-somethings in America, or:

My screwed, coddled, self-absorbed, mocked, surprisingly resilient generation.

On H.H. Holmes “an old hand at corpse manipulation and insurance fraud,” who built a house of death in 1890s Chicago.

A reporter makes it his mission to track down all 42 members of a platoon after their service in Iraq.

In Michele Bachmann’s home district evangelicals have pushed anti-gay policies to the school board. After a rash of suicides, teens are fighting back.

Pavel Galitsky, 100 years old, blogger and Skyper, survivor of 15 years in Stalin’s Siberian Kolyma mines.

On Manoj Bhargava, who says he’s “probably the wealthiest Indian in America,” and his ubiquitous product.

“In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.”

A chronicle of the 2010 wildfire that burned down 169 homes in Colorado, told via the people who lived through it.

In an odd way, crime has fallen off the political landscape. To an extent it's been replaced on the agenda by concern about the dire consequences of mass incarceration. But violent crime itself remains a major area in which the United States lags behind other developed countries. To suggest that smarter management of the criminal justice system could make it less brutal while simultaneously creating large reductions in the quantity of crime sounds utopian. And yet the proposals for parole system reform found in this article are utterly convincing.

-M. Yglesias

On a press junket in Ecuador, the author investigates the ethics of shopping.

How group of misfits in Texas including Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings snubbed Nashville and brought the hippies and rednecks together. An oral history of outlaw country.

Scientists quarrel about the fate of animals living in the 1,600 square mile exclusion zone.

Margaret Profet, evolutionary biologist and MacArthur grant recipient, disappeared in 2005. She has neither been seen nor heard from since.

The story of Trina Garnett, “one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers.”

A trip to Disneyland in the mid-1960s.

Previously posted on Longform.org on January 25th, 2012.

On Jenny Craig’s European expansion and how dieting differs in France and the States.

His book panned in the New York Times after being misread by the critic, an author responds.