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.

When the prosecutor in a 1924 trial focused on the murder of a priest backed the suspect–and everything that followed.

They are the most celebrated in the U.S. military. But hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of “revenge ops,” unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities.

Abdullahi Yusuf was 18 and ready to dedicate his life to ISIS when federal agents pulled him aside in the Minneapolis airport. He will never see the inside of a jail cell.

Why the future feels frozen in time, as framed by Marshall McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)

Life at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s.

An excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Grammy-winning liner notes describing the rise, fall, and rebirth of Roky Erickson, who founded the psychedelic rock pioneers The Thirteenth Floor Elevators before a charge stemming from a single marijuana joint landed him in a Texas mental hospital.

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.