As divided families argued over whether to stay or go, Jones saw part of his congregation slipping away. Al Simon, father of three, wanted to take his children back to America. "No! No! No!" screamed his wife. Someone whispered to her: "Don't worry, we're going to take care of everything." Indeed, as reporters learned later from survivors, Jones had a plan to plant one or more fake defectors among the departing group, in order to attack them. He told some of his people that the Congressman's plane "will fall out of the sky."

"These young men seem to have no conception of the consequences of allying yourself publicly with the far right, even before their hero gets accused of endorsing pedophilia in public. Yiannopoulos has been good to them. They’re having a great time. Over the course of a few hours, I find myself playing an awkward Wendy to these lackluster lost boys as I watch them wrestle with the moral challenge of actually goddamn growing up."

On the tragic flood of elder death in the wake of COVID-19.

And as time arcs and stops and speeds and slows now, I watch myself ride the agony of the death. It’s not out of resistance, exactly, but a need to inquire into both time’s speed and the callous logic, basically eugenicist, that on bad days, the rest of the world seems to hold: that she was old enough to die this way.

A dispatch from Vermont, which is in the midst of what the governor calls a “full-blown heroin crisis.”

How to understand the real-world value of things that are worth nothing and everything at once.

The Interstellar director and the art of the blockbuster cult film.

A profile of the Aurora shooter.

A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events.

Is Bryan Saunders a drug-inspired outsider genius, or just in need of intervention?

An investigation into the death of a sacred white buffalo and the man who raised it.

A history of the Hollywood publicity racket.

On Lucille Miller, who in San Bernadino in 1964 was convicted of burning her husband to death in his Volkswagen.

Searching for answers 40 years after a Brooklyn man threw acid in the face of his 4-year-old neighbor.

A profile of the deadliest sniper in American history, who was murdered last month by a fellow soldier.

Shulamith Firestone, one of the first radical feminists, helped to create a new society. But she couldn’t live in it.

The outing of a failed writer who spent years anonymously grinding axes on Wikipedia.

The quiet life of Brigette Höss, 80, whose father ran Auschwitz.

The case of a teenager who didn’t kill his classmates—but talked about it.

How the ski town of the super-rich is responding to global warming.

On the post-prison lives of several men in West Baltimore.

A profile of Maine’s two U.S. senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

“Is he Socrates or Mengele?” On the late Jack Kevorkian.

On H.H. Holmes “an old hand at corpse manipulation and insurance fraud,” who built a house of death in 1890s Chicago.

Steven Donziger, an American lawyer, headed up a successful lawsuit against Chevron on behalf of Ecuadorans. Then the legal tables turned on him.