The West Memphis Three, teenagers who were convicted in 1993 of brutal killings that they certainly did not commit on the basis of local gossip that they were satanists (as evidenced by Metallica fandom), suddenly found themselves released this summer after over 17 years in prison. But what life awaited them?

Murder in the Juarez Valley:

A few weeks after Saul Reyes and his family fled Mexico, I drove to an immigrant shelter in downtown El Paso to see him. As the former city secretary of Guadalupe, Saul had once been in charge of recording the births and deaths of everyone in his hometown. He’d taken it upon himself now to collect every single name of those who had died or disappeared in Guadalupe since the killing began in 2008. Through media reports and meetings with the many valley exiles now living in Texas, Saul had compiled a list of the town’s dead and disappeared. Showing me the book, he turned page after page of names. So far he had counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and eight unknown bodies dumped in his small town of 3,000 people. “There are a lot more, but these are the ones I’ve been able to collect,” he said. In his careful, spidery script, he had written on one page the names of his six family members.

On the scene of the darkest games in Olympics history.

Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.

He’s got millions of followers on Vine. He’s got sponsors paying him tens of thousands to promote their products. He’s got a vanity license plate that says “AYYYYYYY.” It’s not enough.

Audrey Elrod thought she had found the man of her dreams. Today she is in a West Virginia prison. She’s broke. And the court has ordered her to pay more than $400,000 to victims of the same man who conned her.

He was arrested for pushing his three grandsons so hard on a Grand Canyon hike that rangers feared for their lives. Their account of the summer they spent with their youthful grandpa would include an uncanny understanding of marijuana strains and a stopover in Jamaica.

“She is a tech bro — except she’s a woman, trying to sell underwear. Or, as she sees it, innovating in the ‘period space.’” A profile of Miki Agrawal, founder of Thinx.

An attempt to make sense of the dog meat industry in Vietnam, an unregulated maze of black market slaughterhouses, home restaurants, and thieves who are often murdered in the open when caught stealing the family pet.

One of Europe’s poorest countries wanted a road, so U.S. mega-contractor Bechtel sold it a $1.3 billion highway, with the backing of a powerful American ambassador. Funny thing is, the highway is barely being used—and the ambassador is now working for Bechtel.

Trolls are frustrating, cruel and frightening creatures of the internet deep. But something surprising happens when one writer tries to deal with the worst of hers: He turns out to have a conscience.

It’s the biggest environmental lawsuit in history. The people of Lago Agrio, an oil-rich area in the Ecuadorean Amazon, are suing Chevron for $6 billion after decades of spills. The case has been underway since 1993.

An interview with Lawrence Schiller, himself one of the great interviewers of his time, whose research fueled Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.

Christian Audigier is the man behind Von Dutch and Ed Hardy. The massive succes of his garish and expensive creations may say more about the power of celebrity than about fashion.

A profile of Jimmy Connors on the eve of the 1978 U.S. Open. His legendary confidence, honed by his mother since childhood, was in free-fall. (He would go on to win the final in straight sets.)

In 1906, Enrico Caruso was arrested for molesting a young woman inside the Monkey House of Central Park Zoo, paving the way for the first celebrity trial of the 20th century.

An early attempt to explain the world-changing power of computer software—and the minds of young programmers like Bill Gates—to a mass audience. “Software,” the article begins, “is the magic carpet to the future.”

From the 1940s through the early 70s, incoming freshman at Harvard, Yale, Vassar, Wellesley, and several other top schools were photographed nude in the name of science–bogus science, as it turned out. Most of the photos were destroyed, but not all.

Madeleine Fullard is on a mission to locate the remains of apartheid’s murdered activists. She needs the help of Eugene de Kock, a former police squad leader known as “Prime Evil,” to do so.

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

An $140 million blockbuster written and funded by a billionaire, ‘Empires of the Deep’ was supposed to be China’s ‘Avatar,’ featuring mermaids, Greek warriors, pirates, sea monsters, and an even international stars.

Six years after being filmed, the movie has never seen the light of day.

For those who suffer from environmental illnesses, the town of Snowflake is an escape from a modern world full of allergens: fragrances, gluten, wifi.

Writing The Art of the Deal made Tony Schwartz rich. He still regrets it.