An undercover federal agent behind a massive sting operation that took down dozens of gun-runners and drug-dealers tells all.

Applying big data analysis to Internet Adult Film Database, the IMDB of porn.

Violence convulses the city of Chicago after dark. Reporting on it leaves its own scars.

A small organic agave farmer stands firm against the collision of Big Agriculture and tequila.

An account of the 60 minutes after a heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden that left one boxer with permanent brain damage.

How the magazine industry’s identity crisis is playing out on its front page.

A report from the oil boom in North Dakota, where unemployment is 3.4 percent and McDonald’s gives out $300 signing bonuses.

David Roberts spent his life facing death in the mountains. Now he is facing a fatal prognosis.

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.”

The baseball game that launched a career in fiction.

Bibek Dhong traveled from Nepal to Malaysia to test cameras for the new iPhone 5. When production ended abruptly, he and his coworkers found themselves stranded for two months without money, food or passports.

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.

T La Rock was one of the pioneers of hip-hop. But after an attack put him in a nursing home, he had to fight to recover his identity, starting with the fact that he’d ever been a rapper at all.

A profile of the “acrobatic genius of the trapeze”:

As he spoke, he looked up at the pipes and swings in the arena ceiling. A mechanic was working on the rigging, but Tito spoke thoughtfully, for he seemed to be seeing something else. "Sometimes I see movies of myself in the air and I say, 'Jesus, how can I do that?' I wonder who do I think I am ... but, yes, I do admire myself in films sometimes as if I am watching another person. I have sometimes dreamed my tricks at night, you know, and then tried to master them from the dream."

On realizing you’re going to die.

“Around here the land swallows things.”

On the cusp of delivery, a mother-to-be recounts the anxiety-laden path to parenthood.

Glory isn’t part of the deal when you go to work for the federal government.

A profile of Christopher Brosius, the “Willy Wonka of fragrances,” whose latest creation is designed to not be smelled.

The extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a thousand years apart.

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.