All of Janicza Bravo’s previous movies were playing in the place where humor and trauma meet. Zola was a natural fit.

After the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, Muslim journalists covering Hindu extremism noticed a change. The masks came off; the facade of courtesy, once flimsy, crumbled altogether.

For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?

The system for testing pharmaceuticals in the US relies on contractors adhering to strict guidelines. But one of them chose profits over protocols.

A radical housing program in the San Francisco Bay is recognizing how women who killed their abusers deserve dignity—and a second chance.

A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.

For a decade, Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence had surfed the wave of populist-right politics like few other people in America. Then came Jan. 6.

Selections from the leaked documents about the war in Afghanistan portray a military effort that is ineffective and frequently absurd. (Part of the NYT War Logs series.)

Against all predictions, the Taliban took the Afghan capital in a matter of hours. This is the story of why and what came after, by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.

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.

On the urge to live in a house you can't afford, the "acceptable lust" of American life.