Since exposing the Neapolitan mafia by publishing Gomorrah at age 27, Roberto Saviano has lived for nearly a decade under armed guard, shuttling between anonymous hotels and army barracks.

Trolls are frustrating, cruel and frightening creatures of the internet deep. But something surprising happens when one writer tries to deal with the worst of hers: He turns out to have a conscience.

An excerpt from Night of the Gun, the memoir by New York Times media critic David Carr about his years as a junkie in late-‘80s Minneapolis.

The perpetually underpaid author takes a moonlighting job with Demand Media, publisher of search-engine optimized articles with titles like “Hair Styles for Women Over 50 With Glasses”, absurdity ensues.

She was last seen leaving a pickup bar, her body was found the next morning in the dirt beside a football field. He was ten. Thirty-six years later, the author investigates his mother’s murder.

The aftermath of a childhood filled with subway flashers, teachers who asked for hugs, and boys who joked about your breasts.

More than fifteen years after he died, Fred Rogers has never been more revered—or more misunderstood.

She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.

“None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s truly crazy.”

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

The battle for the old man with “snots running down his nose / Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.”

The writer on his father’s religious devotion to personal style. Among the maxims: “the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”; “there is nothing like a fresh burn”; and “always wear white to the face.”

When his parents marriage imploded, the author’s mother said his father was worthless, a con man. A bad investment in their lives. But years later, a mysterious book about Wall Street showed up—a gift from his father—that began to change the story.

In 2019, I made a painful decision. But to the algorithms that drive Facebook, Pinterest, and a million other apps, I’m forever getting married.

From her deathbed, the author’s mother revealed a secret she had kept for 60 years: her true love was not his father, but a man named Angus Zahrt. On his ensuing search for the full story.

“I never got the ‘I’ve never seen a black woman, let me touch your hair’ vibe, it was more just like, ‘Hi, attractive person, let’s do this.’”

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.

“Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can…”

The fall of Richard Roberts, anointed son and successor of televangelist Oral Roberts, who was fired as president of Oral Roberts University and evicted from the home he’d lived in for nearly 50 years.

Memories of the author’s teenage years, when his father pulled up stakes on a comfortable life in Baltimore to reinvent himself as the head of a S&L bank in Los Angeles.

Notes from the campaign trail in Nevada with Ron Paul.

Part of Longform.org’s guide to the 2012 GOP field at Slate.

Sixteen years after he was exposed as the most fraudulent journalist of his generation, Stephen Glass is confronted by an old friend.

The author’s then-six-year-old ended up with the original artwork for one of the cards in Magic’s Alpha series—but he’s not selling, so don’t even ask.

On losing a mother and a marriage.

“After receiving a trove of documents from the whistleblower, I found myself under surveillance and investigation by the U.S. government.”