Timothy Brown was diagnosed with HIV in the ’90s. In 2006, he found that a new, unrelated disease threatened his life: leukemia. After chemo failed, doctors resorted to a bone marrow transplant. That transplant erased any trace of HIV from his body, and may hold the secret of curing AIDS.

"Of course, sexuality has never only been about reproduction, obviously, with human beings, anyway. But at the moment it's almost cut free to kind of float wherever it will float. And sexuality has been mixed with many things that I think the ancients would have been surprised to find it mixed with."

On Patti Smith.

It was easy for lazy journalists to caricature her as a stringbean who looked like Keith Richards, emitted Dylanish word salads, and dropped names—a high-concept tribute act of some sort, very wet behind the ears. But then her first album, Horses, came out in November 1975, and silenced most of the scoffers.

“Jon Corzine had never had anything to do with the futures business, had never run a public company, and hadn’t worked on Wall Street for a decade. His time there had ended badly. But by any reasonable standard, the former Goldman chief seemed almost embarrassingly overqualified. Says Flowers: ‘It seemed like we had more CEO than company.’”

Three years after her gold-medal performance – and amidst rumors of a fall from grace – the author travels to Transylvania to track down gymnast Nadia Comaneci. He also enjoys several drinks with her coach, Bela Karolyi.

Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.

When she was a 15-year-old runaway, the writer was nearly killed by a truck driver. Twenty-seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

How volunteer firefighters responded to a lethal West, Texas explosion.

How New York City built its own CIA.

Adventures with a group of young Hasidic men looking for God in psychedelic drugs.

How Norman Mailer and other writers wanted to go out.

One man’s experience with a sex surrogate in gay-conversion therapy.

How sectarian violence has made life in northern Nigeria “incomprehensibly frightful.”

Memories of a lovely afternoon with a serial killer.

Bernie Kerik and Jack Abramoff on “Club Fed.”

Unraveling a lucrative crime ring.

How Kinfolk makes money while driving people crazy.

A mother’s quest to find a diagnosis for her daughter’s mysterious condition.

What it was like to report on feminism for Playboy in 1969.

Why did a man travel 200 miles to die in a national park?

“Post-dignity design” and why apps speak to adults like children.

On Robin Williams’s final months.

On Bruce Springsteen’s song, and growing up in a factory town.