The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise?

While the virus has ravaged rich nations, reported death rates in poorer ones remain relatively low. What probing this epidemiological mystery can tell us about global health.

Serial arson in rural Virginia: a love story.

Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. They didn’t know each other, and never would. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery.

The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped?

He was a shining star of a tight-knit group of rising Black male models in London. Why did he die at the hands of another model?

Sentenced to life in prison at 16, Adolfo Davis hoped a Supreme Court ruling would give him a chance at a new beginning. But nothing about freedom turned out as he expected.

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

Jeffrey Fang was a ride-hailing legend, a top earner with relentless hustle. Then his minivan was carjacked—with his kids in the back seat.

In 2003, a man robbed a bank with a bomb around his neck. It exploded shortly thereafter, taking his life and leaving authorities to try to figure out who had put it there.

American anti-trafficking groups often make impossible-to-verify claims. Now, they’re doing it in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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.