In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed teenagers with nothing to lose.

Eagleman, a neuroscientist, describes how groundbreaking advances in the science of brain have changed our understanding of volition in criminal acts, and may erode the underpinnings of our justice system.

In 1993 a black teenager in London was randomly stabbed to death by a gang of white youths. Twenty years later, they would be at the center of the trial of the decade.

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, denies that he was ever in the IRA. The murder of Jean McConville threatened to expose him as a liar.

A hundred and fifty years ago, slightly more, a strange notion: the dead could be counted. In the Civil War, in the lush fields of the South, Americans first, as a culture, began to imagine death in numbers. Rosters of soldiers, as well as lists of war casualties, were not common practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials feared responsibility for the dead by numbering or naming them, and military leaders felt an accurate count might embolden their enemies.

A former Facebook executive critiques Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” movement.

A life with bipolar disorder.

A son goes to visit his dying father.

For a daily short story recommendation from our editors, try Longform Fiction or follow @longformfiction on Twitter.

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 U.S. had been his home since he was 6 months old. When he was deported 
to Mexico 26 years later, it was more than he could bear.

George Floyd’s killing galvanized a nation. But small groups like the queer-led collective Black Visions are channeling that energy into a movement for political change.

She fabricated harrowing personal backstories, peddled gross caricatures, and spoke from perspectives she had no right to claim. And nobody stopped her.

The fire department working a desolate New Mexico mesa is made up of 15 anarchists and recluses and led by a friendly giant whose job is to be an administrator in a place that defies administration.

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.

The struggle behind the making of Terence Malick’s first movie in twenty years and the two producers who, depending on your source, either made it possible or nearly ruined it.

In the chaotic days before the Berlin Wall fell, the East German secret police shredded 45 million pages. Fifteen years later, a team of computer scientists figured out how to put it all back together.

An oil tanker was ordered to save more than 100 migrants floating in the middle of the Mediterranean. Europe didn’t want them. They couldn’t go back to Libya. How would they survive?

Maria Ressa, editor of a popular news site in the Philippines, has incurred President Duterte and his supporters’ wrath by investigating his extrajudicial killing campaign.

The famous subreddit started as a forum for one man to ask about his workplace behavior. Seven years later, it’s become a platform where millions of people discuss good, bad, and everything in between.

Why the world is becoming less free.

The cover story from the June 2011 print edition of The New Republic, available on the web specially for readers of Longform.org.

Twenty years ago, Ramaphosa was by Mandela’s side as apartheid ended and in line to become deputy president. He didn’t get the job. Now one of the richest men in Africa, he’s finally getting the chance.

You get steeped in this stuff as a kid, even if some part of you was always skeptical, it's hard to lose the residual sense that everything unfolding in the world—from natural disasters to commerce and geopolitics—signals some approaching doomsday.

In 1936, a school group from south London went on a hike in the Black Forest. Despite the heroic rescue attempts of German villagers, five boys died. Eighty years later, locals are still asking how it happened.