As a young social psychologist, she played by the rules and won big: an influential study, a viral TED talk, a prestigious job at Harvard. Then, suddenly, the rules changed.

“I came to Weeki Wachee to sound the mystery of the mermaid, to find danger and sex and darkness and maybe hear my own deeps echoed back.”

When a day hike in Rocky Mountain National Park ended in a grisly death, Investigative Services Branch veteran Beth Shott hit the trail, where she began unraveling a harrowing case.

On living with the internet.

A profile of a previously unknown rookie pitcher for the Mets who dropped out of Harvard, made a spiritual quest to Tibet, and somewhere along the line figured out how to throw a baseball much, much faster than anyone else on Earth.

What happens when a great deal of cocaine suddenly washes up on the shores of a very small island.

For years, the clients of a Colorado funeral home kept their loved ones’ cremated remains. Then the FBI called.

Dozens of convicted criminals have been hired as cops in Alaska communities. Often, they are the only applicants. In Stebbins, every cop has a criminal record, including the chief.

National developers are behind the proliferation of luxury apartments near college campuses, and they’re driving low-income students farther away.

Patrick Bryne’s tenure at Overstock.com was already on the rocks, due to an all in bet on blockchain technology, before he admitted that he had an affair with the Russian operative Maria Butina.

Another inmate was unable to complete his application, and assented to voluntary departure, in which an immigrant agrees to leave the country at his or her own expense. “You’ll be on your way back to Mexico today,” said the judge.

On sleep deprivation in the NBA.

A charming assistant funeral home director named Bernie Tiede murders a wealthy widow, keeps her in a freezer for months, finally gets caught, and still has the town's sympathy as his case goes to trial. The story that became Richard Linklater's Bernie.

Todd Marinovich was engineered from birth to be the greatest quarterback of all time. He ended up doing heroin in the locker room. A 2010 National Magazine Award winner, reprinted on Longform.

What links an eccentric Oxford classics don, billionaire US evangelicals, and a tiny, missing fragment of an ancient manuscript?

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League did everything it could to keep lesbians off the diamond. Seventy-five years later, its gay stars are finally opening up.

People in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, thought Lois Reiss was a nice wife and grandmother. If she had a vice, it was playing the slots. Then she committed murder.

Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens’ early work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like.

Mexico City has one of the most ambitious and sophisticated video surveillance systems in the world. But it hasn’t stopped crime.

Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives.

Rédoine Faïd loved the movies, and his greatest crimes were laced with tributes: to Point Break, Heat, and Reservoir Dogs. When he landed in a maximum-security prison, cinema provided inspiration once again.

It seemed like an easy crime to stop: protected Indonesian rainforest, cut for coffee farms. But a globalized economy can undermine even the best-laid plans.

Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out

Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organized their societies—and hint at possibilities for our own,