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.”

The Mennonite women of the Manitoba Colony would awake with blood and semen stains, dried grass in their hair, and tiny bits of rope on their wrists and ankles. Their rapists, armed with a veterinary tranquilizer converted to spray form, were eight young men from their own community.

“There was an unwritten rule in Mia Farrow’s house that Woody Allen was never supposed to be left alone with their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan.”

Tyson on his childhood in Brooklyn and the man who changed his life. An excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Undisputed Truth.

Jeffrey Holliman was deep in debt and out of options. So he took to the woods outside his small East Texas town. Then he started taking from his neighbors.

Fifty years after Joseph Mitchell published “Joe Gould’s Secret” in The New Yorker, one last question about Gould—the identity of his anonymous benefactor—is answered.

In an old mine an hour north of Pittsburgh, 600 federal employees manage paperwork for the government’s retirement system. By hand. On paper. Without computers. The same exact way they always have.

The creators of some of the most distinctive craft beers in the world are identical twins from Denmark. They also can’t stand each other.

Previously: Jonah Weiner on the Longform Podcast.

On the life and death of Avonte Oquendo, a 14-year-old autistic boy who disappeared in October after walking out of his New York City school.

Previously: Robert Kolker on the Longform Podcast.

If you hit a bar or restaurant in South Miami, there’s a good chance Eddie Santana has waited tables there. And then sued. Sometimes after only a single day on the job.

Last summer, when she thought nobody was looking, Mary Bale put a cat in the trash. The act was caught on video, and Bale was quickly tried and convicted online. The aftermath of a viral crime.

At times, Mr. Hsieh comes across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them.

A profile of the Zappos CEO.

How a 22-year-old with five warrants for her arrest in Utah conned her way through Brooklyn armed with nothing more than a dirty mouth and a penchant for faking pregnancy and/or cancer.

In 1967, Stanley Ann Dunham took her 6-year-old son, Barry, on an adventure to Indonesia. An excerpt from A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother.