A two-part write-around of the world’s only billionaire.

How Bert Schneider, a well-heeled Hollywood producer with a coke problem and a soft spot for radical politics, smuggled Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers who was awaiting trial on a murder charge, into Cuba in 1974.

How the Bounty, a busted-up replica built in 1960 for the film Mutiny on the Bounty, ended up 100 miles out to sea during the height of Hurricane Sandy.

Shanghai, in 1989 and 2013. Excerpted from A History of Future Cities.

Alfred Anaya was a genius at installing secret compartments in cars. If they were used to smuggle drugs without his knowledge, he figured, that wasn’t his problem. He was wrong.

On former nursing student One L. Goh, who killed six people at Oikos University in Oakland, California, and what it means to the Korean immigrant community.

“Southwark’s petty thugs must have thought all their birthdays had come at once: a well-dressed toff stumbling round their borough in no state to defend himself, and with an alcoholic street whore as his only companion.”

Reconstructing a mysterious 1892 London murder.

On an artist who’s spent nearly 50 years bending the rules of space and light, and his life’s work, an extinct volcano in Arizona where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974.

On the county fair and casino circuit with Huey Lewis, who at 61 is “part of a select fraternity of musicians who can draw a couple thousand people in dozens (if not hundreds) of middle-American towns … scattered throughout the country.”

How Russia consistently undermines the U.N. in order to keep a multi-billion dollar monopoly on the sales of helicopters and airplanes.

Making the case that all Pixar movies exist on a cohesive timeline in the same universe dominated by a central theme: the battle between animals, humans and machines.

The strange saga of Gordon Todd Skinner, a psychedelic aficionado and government informant who is now serving time in prison for kidnapping and torturing his wife’s teenage lover.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, on crying in movie theaters, “attention whores” and David Foster Wallace.

How the Google co-founder, forced out of a leadership role in 2001, came back to run the company 10 years later.

In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.

Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.

On the urge to live in a house you can't afford, the "acceptable lust" of American life.

Marion and Larry Pollard live in the suburbs. They have eight grandkids and a terrier named Bella. They can also expel demons and save your soul.

How two boys, 10 and 11, were sentenced to years in a detention facility for a crime they didn’t get a chance to commit.

How Hafeez Contractor is creating an alternate India in the sky, where professionsals are “insulated from the chaos that has long hamstrung their homeland.”

A profile of the Megaupload founder, who has started a political party in New Zealand as the U.S. continues to fight for his extradition.

Margaret Keane’s husband stole credit for her iconic paintings, basking in fame and fortune that should have been hers for years. Then she told a reporter the truth.