How New York Times is clawing its way into the future:

The main goal is... to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering... while continuously adding new online services and features... so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones.

For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious attitude, but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from the forces of culture that would commodify it.

A profile of the Hot 97 DJ a few months after “he told the truth about who he is, even if it’s not entirely clear—even to Mister Cee himself, even now, to this day—what exactly that truth is.”

Despite its association with piracy, BitTorrent is a company in its own right, and one desperate to hit upon a way to monetize its revolutionary file transfer technology.

Four men stood on the edge of the Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission, threatening to jump in protest. They referred to themselves as “China’s 21st century eunuchs,” damaged by medically-dubious surgeries.

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.

On the tortured psyche of former 49ers coach Bill Walsh and how it led to Finding the Winning Edge, his 550-page guide to the game that has become the football’s bible.

Aaron Greene and Morgan Gliedman were young and in love and pregnant and partial to heroin and living in a Village apartment with a lot of heavy weaponry lying about. Then they were arrested, and their stories started to change.

Aside from the wealthiest players, nine out of 10 NFL athletes are likely to be insolvent within 10 years of retirement. A new executive MBA program aims to change that.

Robert Aaron was a veteran horn player who sold bags of heroin to friends to support his own habit. Then his friend Philip Seymour Hoffman overdosed.

A cross-country drive with Michael O'Donoghue, the first head writer of Saturday Night Live.

Previously: The Longform Guide to SNL.

How a Canadian used a Mohawk reservation’s lakes to smuggle tons of marijuana to stash houses in Brooklyn and Staten Island, resulting in nearly a billion in profits, which he laundered through the Sinaloa Cartel.

The Four Seasons restaurant rose to fame as a place to cut deals and be seen. Then its chauvinistic ways – and, specifically, those of its owner – caught up with it.

If you wanted a divorce in the late 1800s, you had to move to South Dakota. Even if you were the niece of John Jacob Astor III.

After Brooke Melton died in a car crash, her parents approached attorney Lance Cooper to investigate. What he found in her 2005 Chevy Cobalt would lead to GM’s 30 million-vehicle recall.

A look at the brave new world of privatized postal services, “optimized to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses.”

On Forever 21 and the rise of “fast fashion”:

They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly.

A Denver businessman’s revolutionary green energy company turned out to be nothing but a Ponzi scheme built to fund a lifestyle of booze-soaked hotel orgies with flown-in prostitutes.

Just after midnight, Rye police arrived to bust a house full of partying teenagers. The kids refused to unlock the door, and parents and cops flooded the street. A minute-by-minute account of the standoff.

Inside the dynastic war between the heirs to rulership of the largest Hasidic sect in the world. The prize – all of Hasidic Williamsburg – may prove to be ungovernable.

Alex Malarkey co-wrote a bestselling book about a near-death experience. Last week he admitted he made it up. Why wasn’t anyone listening to a quadriplegic boy and a mother who simply wanted to tell the truth?

When Nazi-sympathizing politician Jorg Haider died in a crash, his 27-year-old protégé Stefan Petzner was left to lead the Austrian far right—and to mourn the boss who he revealed was also his lover.

Advice from 1982 on how and why one should buy a computer. “I can hardly bring myself to mention the true disadvantage of computers,” Fallows writes, “which is that I have become hopelessly addicted to them.”

Far outside of Juarez, villagers in rural areas are trapped without supplies or protection as rival cartels attempt to starve each other out of ranch hideouts. A heavily armed convoy attempts to deliver pensions behind siege lines.