On Elena Ferrante:

Different names, every time, but the reaction is the same: a momentary light in the listener’s eyes that fades to bored disappointment. An Italian woman from Naples, whose name you wouldn’t know. Who did you expect?

As a teenage sales clerk, Monica Prata noticed that men were coming into stores with an interest in women’s clothing and makeup. So she decided to become a “feminine image consultant.”

The founding fathers deserve at least some of the blame for the worst presidencies in American history—they created an office that’s vaguely defined and ripe for abuse. Plus: how to fix it.

Mykal Riley’s last-second three-pointer kept thousands of fans out of the path of a tornado. Just as remarkable? That Riley was there to take the shot in the first place.

The rise and fall of NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association), from its 1970s founding as a splinter group within the gay rights movement to its current incarnation as the most reviled organization in America.

The managing editor’s suicide has received extensive press coverage, in part because the story appeared to be a relatively simple one: his boss was a bully. It was more complicated than that.

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.”

Only 16 counties regularly impose death sentences, and they have three things in common: overaggressive prosecutors, defense lawyers who aren’t up to the task and cultural legacies of racial bias. Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit is among them.

Every year, thousands of teenagers from one city in Nigeria risk death and endure forced labor and sex work on the long route to Europe.

To support their families back home, women from the Philippines have found work and a new way of life in Israel. But at what price?

“It was a crumbling Parkdale rooming house, populated by drug users and squatters and available on the cheap. We were cash-strapped, desperate to move and hemmed in by a hot market.”

A young, pregnant woman named Laci Peterson disappears, her husband begins to act strangely, and one of the largest media circuses in history descends on the sleepy community of Modesto, CA.

The intertwined destinies of Siti Aisyah, a 25-year-old devout Muslim villager turned prostitute and eventual assassin, and Kim Jong-nam, who was raised as the heir to the North Korean dictatorship and died in a Malaysian airport.

Kids have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.

At 93, Jimmy Carter still spends most weekends in his hometown, preaching wise and powerful sermons. Sermons that speak to our current national crisis. That make us realize: We need Mr. Jimmy now more than ever.

Dan Mallory, who writes under the name A. J. Finn, went to No. 1 with his debut thriller, The Woman in the Window. His life contains even stranger twists.

During the Great Floods of 2011, the Mississippi unleashed deadly currents and a flow rate that could fill the Superdome in less than a minute. Defying government orders, the author and two friends canoed 300 miles from Memphis to Vicksburg. This is their story.

Patrick Bryne’s tenure at Overstock.com was already on the rocks, due to an all in bet on blockchain technology, before he admitted that he had an affair with the Russian operative Maria Butina.

Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

While searching for the person who grifted me in Chicago, I discovered just how easy it is for users of the short-term rental platform to get exploited.

Todd Marinovich was engineered from birth to be the greatest quarterback of all time. He ended up doing heroin in the locker room. A 2010 National Magazine Award winner, reprinted on Longform.

How a fearsome, fast-talking union boss became a leading figure in cannabis legalization while shaking down the very people he was supposed to be helping.

The motley gang of L.A. teens that cat-burgled celebrities, sometimes repeatedly, in search of designer clothes, jewelry, and something to do. The story that became The Bling Ring.

Texas juries send people to death row by making predictions about future violence. Racial bias has often played a troubling role. In the 1970s, one Supreme Court case paved the way.