In 2011, just before Christmas, a tiny Spanish town won 120 million Euros in the lottery. A trip to the new Sodeto.

In a Turkish hotel, veterans of the Libyan Revolution meet with their fractured Syrian counterparts to transfer know-how and heavy weaponry.

Twenty-six years after he was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife, Michael Morton sees the real killer brought to justice in a Texas courthouse.

Women who left their careers to be stay-at-home mothers reflect on the decision ten years later.

What did soccer have to do with two brutal murders after a pickup game?

Inside the N.S.A.’s mission to spy on just about everyone.

The journey from a Sudanese refugee camp to an Atlanta police academy.

The Giants' miraculous 1951 comeback wasn't all that it seemed.

Previously: The Longform Guide to Cheaters.

Stuck between the Taliban and the U.S. Military, Afghanistan’s farmers risk their lives both when they grow, and when they refuse to grow, fields of poppies.

In 1991, Frank Sterling confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. His story highlights a common – and controversial – method of police interrogation.

Why has the Palestinian cause failed to produce a Martin Luther King-like leader with a platform based on non-violence?

A profile of CeaseFire, a group of “violence interrupters” attempting to prevent street shootings by treating them like an infectious disease.

The story of the 1969 murder spree by Charles Manson and “Family” as told by those close to the case.

On the investors betting big on the Iraqi economy, which they believe has nowhere to go but up.

By 2006, S&P was making its own study of such loans' performance. It singled out 639,981 loans made in 2002 to see if its benign assumptions had held up. They hadn't. Loans with piggybacks were 43% more likely to default than other loans, S&P found. In April 2006, S&P said it would raise by July the amount of collateral underwriters must include in many new mortgage portfolios. For instance, S&P could require that mortgage pools have extra loans in them, since it now expected a larger number to go bad. Still, S&P didn't lower its ratings on existing securities, saying it had to further monitor the performance of loans backing them. It thus helped the market for these loans hold up through the end of 2006.

An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.

How an Italian thug looted MGM, brought Credit Lyonnais to its knees, and made the Pope cry.

A high school student disappears, only to turn up more than 10 years later – posing as a high school student.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

A reporter makes it his mission to track down all 42 members of a platoon after their service in Iraq.

On then-agent, now-congressman Michael Grimm and what happens when an F.B.I. informant turns out to be a con man.

In Michele Bachmann’s home district evangelicals have pushed anti-gay policies to the school board. After a rash of suicides, teens are fighting back.

On Mike Powell, a Chicago-area high school wrestling coach who hasn’t allowed a life-threatening illness to interrupt his life’s work.

From a small Ohio town to Afghanistan, a portrait of the perpetrator of a massacre.