When a call center gig turns out to be something else.

A trip to Malheur Refuge.

Can a college course teach us how to be happy?

Inside the effort to prevent migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border.

“I know that, as a white man, I have to hold my fellow white men accountable.”

A grandmother’s tale of the night her first love had to leave town.

Inside the battle between Ivanka and Don Jr. to be next in line.

How far can abused women go to protect themselves?

Ari Emanuel’s failure to launch.

A trip to Carbohydrate Camelot.

Inside the tech industry’s decades-long failure to reckon with risk.

A trip to Batumi, Georgia.

How a self-taught linguist came to own an indigenous language.

Two ordinary Americans, inspired by right-wing extremism, plan to kidnap a cop.

We’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.

A trip to the “Olympics of hairdressing” with Team USA.

Daniel Hale exposed the machinery of America’s clandestine warfare. Why did no one seem to care?

But the more that I tried to remind myself of the various ways in which I did, in fact, seem to have a body that was moving, with a heart that pumped blood, the more agitated I became. Being dead butted up against the so-called evidence of being alive, and so I grew to avoid that evidence because proof was not a comfort; instead, it pointed to my insanity.

White sharks are hunting along Cape Cod’s beaches. What will it take to keep people safe?

Why the world is becoming less free.

The cover story from the June 2011 print edition of The New Republic, available on the web specially for readers of Longform.org.

Chains, knives, fists, and, of course, those crude and unreliable homemade affairs called zip guns were the staples in the more vicious gang wars in the 1940s and 1950s. Today there is scarcely a gang in the Bronx that cannot muster a factory-made piece for every member—at the very least, a .22-caliber pistol, but quite often heavier stuff: .32s, .38s, and .45s, shotguns, rifles, and—I have seen them myself—even machine guns, grenades, and gelignite, an explosive. One gang, the Royal Javelins, has acquired some walkie-talkie radios.

Interviews with modern travelling salesmen. The article inspired Kirn’s novel Up in the Air.

What makes this a truly military culture, besides its overwhelming maleness, its air of emotional deprivation and the lousy rations, is its obsession with rank and hierarchy. Like jungle gorillas, business travelers always know where they stand versus the rest of the group. In this parallel universe of upgrade vouchers and priority-boarding privileges, everyone has a number and a position, and who gets that open aisle seat in first class means even more on the road then who earns what.

The author interviews England in prison:

By now, people all over the world have heard of Lynndie England. She's the "Small-Town Girl Who Became an All-American Monster," as one Australian newspaper headline described her, or "the girl with a leash," as Mick Jagger calls her in the song "Dangerous Beauty." Yet England remains a mystery. Is she a torturer? A pawn? Another victim of the Iraq war? While the world weighed in, England said very little.

“The grand jury witness who testified that she saw Michael Brown pummel a cop before charging at him ‘like a football player, head down,’ is a troubled, bipolar Missouri woman with a criminal past who has a history of making racist remarks and once insinuated herself into another high-profile St. Louis criminal case with claims that police eventually dismissed as a ‘complete fabrication.’”