Lauren spent six years of her childhood locked in a closet, starved and tortured by her birth mother and stepfather. Miraculously, she survived; that’s when her long road to recovery began.

After nearly a year in Afghanistan—during which almost half of their unit was killed or injured—paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne have one more mission before they go home.

Bill Ackman’s hedge fund planned to make a fortune while doing good by exposing Herbalife as a scheme that preyed upon and lied to the poor. How one of the highest profile stock shorts in market history went awry.

How junk arson science convicted a mother of killing her own daughters.

On living with the internet.

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.

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.

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain.

An investigation of the county’s Tactical Narcotics Team and, in particular, a Christmas-themed sting dubbed “Santa’s Helper”:

A two-month investigation by New Times has found that Santa's Helper was a colossal waste of police resources. Of the 112 suspects arrested, 73 people were charged only with misdemeanor pot possession. The vast majority of the busted pot smokers were either released within 24 hours or avoided jail by promising to show up in court. Of the 73 alleged tokers, 68 of them — including Dante Level and his siblings — had no violent criminal record. If they were guilty of anything, it was smoking a joint on their own front porch.

How meteorologists are improving their predictive powers.

Timothy Treadwell liked to say that, “Grizzlies are misunderstood.” Then one killed him.

“A body is a body, but personal effects are a life.”

One in three families can’t afford diapers. Why are they so expensive?

Over the last several weeks, dozens of lawmakers, strategists and advocates described the closed-door meetings and tactical decisions that led to approval of same-sex marriage in New York, about two years after it was rejected by the Legislature. This account is based on those interviews, most of which were granted on the condition of anonymity to describe conversations that were intended to be confidential.

He’d blown the Denver debate. Now he was on the verge of blowing the second and risking his reelection. “I just don’t know if I can do this,” Obama told his team. The story of how they turned things around, excerpted from Double Down: Game Change 2012.

Irving Kahn is about to celebrate his 106th birthday. He still goes to work every day. Scientists are studying him and several hundred other Ashkenazim to find out what keeps them going. And going. And going.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

A profile of filmmaker Michael Haneke.

Who we think we are in 2015.

Why so many black families are losing their property.

A profile of Brian Eno as he transitioned into installation art.

For a half-century fires have burned under Centralia, PA.

A man’s search for his kidnapped children in India and Nepal.