"Caught between the dealers and the cops in Hazleton, Pa., is a woman with a bad habit."

Previously: Susan Dominus on the Longform Podcast.

A profile of Uruguay President José Mujica, a former revolutionary who’s been shot six times, was imprisoned for 14 years and, since taking office, has shunned the presidential mansion in favor of a small farm while legalizing gay marriage, abortion and marijuana.

A study in building spaceships.

A man heads to Key West in a quest for sobriety.

A woman reels in the wake of her mother’s absence.

Following Muammar Qaddafi’s death in 2011, Libya had hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the story of how it was erased.

Scenes from a local bar in winter.

The tragic romance of Jim Irsay, the shrewd owner of the Indianapolis Colts, and Kimberly Wundrum, a mother who shared his longtime addiction to painkillers, that ended with her overdosing in the secret condo he bought her.

A profile of law professor Dan Kahan, “one of the best-known unknown academics in the country,” who wants to close the communication gap between scientists and the public.

She lives in a world called Calalini with an invisible companion named 400-the-Cat; inside the life of a six-year-old with schizophrenia.

“For every other kid in the room, the science experiment probably amounts to just another classroom activity, but for the Nashes the project is a reminder of Molly’s own fight for life and the controversial cutting-edge medicine that saved her.”

“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment.”

How the pop psychedelic author helped jumpstart the modern apocalypse movement after an alleged visit from “Quetzal-coatl, a mystical bird-serpent in Mayan myths.”

From 1975-1986, Anthony Edward Dokoupil distributed more than 50 tons of weed in the United States. The operation ruined his family and destroyed his life. Three decades later, his son came looking for answers.

In 1913, Joe Knowles became a media sensation after fleeing into the Maine woods wearing nothing but a jockstrap. Two months and one bear-clubbing incident later, the “Nature Man” returned to civilization as a hero. But was it all hoax?

The rise and fall of Synanon, an addiction-recovery cult in California, and its charismatic leader, a one-time homeless wino named Chuck Dederich who taught his followers to berate each other for therapy.

In Ramapo, New York, the immigrant community and the growing population of Hasidic Jews had eyed each increasing wariness for years. Then the Hasidim took over the public schools, schools their children do not attend, and proceeded to gut them.

In the ring, Hector “Macho” Camacho was a champ. Out of it, he was a coke-fueled, womanizing wild man, until the appetites that consumed him cost him his life.

On Japanese writer Gengoroh Tagame, who creates gay manga work “in the artistic tradition of Pasolini, de Sade, Yukio Mishima and Lolita.”

The long, strange trip of the Wikipedia founder, who went from being an Insane Clown Posse fan who owned the “Bomis Babe Report” to a jet-setter married to “the most connected woman in London,” all without turning much of a profit.

On the film The Act of Killing, in which the actual perpetrators of a 1966-1966 Indonesian genocide recreate their own actions for the camera, and what it can tell us about our memories of the Vietnam War.

Remembering the indie rock club that The New York Times once said was “so New York that it’s in New Jersey.”

“It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.”