It is agreed that the 1977 political murder of a couple in Johannesburg was a political killing that covered up mysterious Swiss Bank deposits. Various reports implicate Cuban Nationalists, Italian Fascists and the CIA.

He called himself “TheNoseDoctor” and performed sinus surgeries, many of them unnecessary, at a maniacal clip. When the whole thing fell apart, he left behind his yacht and family, and disappeared into the Alps.

On America’s deep and persistent fear of the black penis.

Alex Vardakostas has been on a decade-long quest to build a robot that can prepare the perfect cheeseburger. It could also put his family out of work.

Alex French and Maximillian Potter chased the story of a Hollywood pedophile ring only to have Esquire cancel it without explanation. It eventually landed at The Atlantic.

On Wall Street, being Black often means being alone, held back, deprived of the best opportunities.

Thomas Quick confessed to more than 30 murders. But the man also known as Sture Bergwall may not have committed any of them.

A profile of Luis Suarez.

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press.

“The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.”

In May 2018, schoolgirl Ana Kriégel was lured from her home, brought to an abandoned house, and murdered. A year later two 14-year-old boys were found guilty of her killing, becoming the youngest people in the history of Ireland to be convicted of murder.

On Erdogan’s struggle for power.

On prospecting for space rocks in Kansas.

The afterlife of 486 frames of Kodachrome II 8mm film shot by Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder.

In a remote corner of Romania, neighbors kill each other over tiny strips of land.

How a disgruntled group of University of Miami football fans got the head coach fired by flying insulting airplane banners high over Sun Life Stadium.

A blow by blow account of the seizure of a French cruise ship by Somali pirates.

A trip to a lobster festival leads to an examination of the culinary and ethical dimensions of cooking a live, possibly sentient, creature.

Twenty years ago, ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ set a new standard for open-world video games. The titles it inspired have grown bigger and busier, but it takes more than massive maps to give gamers the freedom they felt on their first trip to 3-D Liberty City.

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.

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

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.

How the children of African immigrants came to control the destiny of teams in France and Belgium and what it says about European identity.