William Sparkman Jr., a census worker, was found hanging from a tree in rural Kentucky. He was naked, hands bound, with the letters “FED” written across his chest. Inside the investigation into how – and why – he died.

After watching his father Sandy abuse his paralyzed former-jockey mother for years, Mat Crichton committed murder. Nearly the entire local farming community rallied in support of him.

Life in Green Bank, West Virginia, a town without cell signals and a haven people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (a disease that may or may not exist).

On an Indonesian town that serves both as stopping point for those seeking to reach Australia by boat and a hotspot for short term ‘contract marriage,’ which allows Saudi tourists a loophole to engage in Islamic-sanctioned prostitution.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.

On “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez,who terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco through a string of over 30 home invasion murders starting in 1984 and ending when he was recognized and apprehended by an angry mob.

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.

“You know a storm is going to be bad, people in Oklahoma will tell you, when Gary England removes his jacket.” A profile of a meteorologist who has worked Tornado Alley for more than 40 years.

On Silicon Valley's newfound interest in the weed business.

Previously: Mat Honan on the Longform Podcast.

How divisions between Nigeria’s Muslim North and Christian South resulted in the birth of terror’s most ruthless movement.

A profile of the Rookie editor-in-chief, who makes her Broadway debut next week.

The bumpy rise of Saturday Night Live’s first star.

Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with limits on abortion. Activists like Rebecca Gompert imagine a future where those limits are meaningless because most abortions happen at home.

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.

Jamie Smith said he was a co-founder of Blackwater and a former CIA officer. He appeared on cable news as a counterterrorism expert and he received millions in goverment contracts to train personnel. The money was real. The resume wasn’t.

The author on why he belives in God (“It makes things better”), the perils of writing high (“Annie Wilkes is cocaine, she was my number-one fan”) and what he thinks of other writers (“Hemingway sucks, basically”).

Christopher Catambrone wants to help illegal migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean in ill-equipped, unsafe boats. But it’s hard to do alone.

Struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide, Army officer Lawrence Franks went AWOL. Five years later, he reappeared as Christopher Flaherty, a member of the French Foreign Legion who served three tours in Africa. Then he was court-martialed.

Why are so many teenagers killing themselves in Palo Alto?

If you wanted a divorce in the late 1800s, you had to move to South Dakota. Even if you were the niece of John Jacob Astor III.

A week on the campaign trail in the coffin-shaped Immortality Bus with Zoltan Istvan, the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.

How a distillery worker in Kentucky stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bourbon, one barrel at a time.

When cops kill civilians, their union is on hand to defend them. In many cases this has come at the expense of the truth.

The idea was to shoot a Neiman Marcus fur catalog in the Andes mountains, not get stranded on them.