Inside the effort to exonerate the “Starved Rock Killer.” After 60 years behind bars for one of this state’s most infamous crimes, Chester Weger is out to prove his innocence with DNA testing.

“‘If there’s anything I can do to make your trip more enjoyable, let me know.” He walked away, then he strode back to Cree 15 seconds later and whispered, making eye contact, “Anything.’”

Medicine used to be obsessed with eradicating the tiny bugs that live within us. Now we’re beginning to understand all the ways they keep us healthy.

Getting clean with a three-day trip.

Previously: The Longform Guide to Addiction.

How Leo Sharp got busted.

Can neuroscience take the pain out of painful memories?

He was an early video streaming startup founder who threw parties where celebrities like Bryan Singer had sex with teenage boys. Then, he came to believe that music mogul David Geffen was trying to kill him.

A French soccer star’s rise and fall from sports to cons to the Nazi Party.

“The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor.”

On the online mug shot industry, which posts mug shots of anyone arrested (regardless of conviction) and charges $30 to $400 to have the photo removed.

After a final film, Kevin Smith is going to retire to a life of podcasting and speaking tours. Or so he says.

On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.

Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

An attempt to sort out whether Vick is truly a changed man or simply a very gifted football player who was bound to be forgiven.

The early days of electronic spreadsheets and how the tool transformed business.

Christopher Clayton Hutton hatched a plan to deliver Monopoly boards to British prisoners of war. The games were advertised as a diversion, but really they offered a way out.

How Billy Walters, the world’s most successful gambler, keeps winning.

Paleram Chauhan, a 52-year-old Indian farmer, was shot dead during the summer of 2013. The reason: his opposition to a gang of criminals stealing his village’s sand to sell on the black market.

A man felt wronged by his ex-girlfriend, a video game designer. So he published a 9,425-word online screed with “each component designed to be as damaging to [her] as possible.” It sparked the online fire known as “Gamergate.”

“Amazon has done a great job,” Jobs said. “We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.” Or they were planning to stand on Amazon’s neck and press down hard.

The Columbia shuttle was to be a revolution for NASA. But a year before its first launch, the shuttle was several years behind schedule, had cost $1 billion, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever get off the ground.

How HBO went from sitcoms starring Delta Burke and O.J. Simpson to The Wire. The view from a former HBO employee who witnessed the channel’s rise to prominence firsthand.

The story of Charles Goodyear, who dedicated his life to inventing usable rubber yet has little to show for it, aside from his name on the side of a blimp.

How an Iraqi expat conned the United States, without ever once being interviewed by an American official, into making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. “Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq.”

She claimed to be a porn recruiter who just needed to see the women have sex with her photographer once before she could book them for jobs. But she and her photographer were the same person — a freelance tech journalist named Matt Hickey.