While a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, Austin Tice decided he wanted to become a war photographer. He entered Syria and filed stories for McClatchy and the Washington Post. Then he disappeared.

Mark Hogancamp nearly died after being jumped by five men in 2000. After waking from a coma with no memories, he developed an extraordinary coping device: he built a miniature town in his garden where he gets his revenge.

Bomb makers—including ISIS—have been on a quest to obtain red mercury, a weapon reputed to be powerful enough to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” They haven’t found it yet. That might be because it doesn’t exist.

A trip to Enya’s castle in Ireland.

According to the trades and his pitch to investors, Ryan Kavanaugh had found film business formula that couldn’t lose. It could. Unraveling a Tinseltown Ponzi scheme.

From “Idiocracy” to “Silicon Valley,” the writer and director has established himself as America’s foremost chronicler of its own self-destructive tendencies.

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Previously: Conover discusses this story on the Longform Podcast.

A profile of Chencho Dorji, Bhutan’s first psychiatrist, who has treated “more than 5,300 depressed, anxious, psychotic and drug-addled” people since 1999.

Kids have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, molded in their own image.

At 90 years old, Lawrence Hill’s mother was ready to end it all on her own terms, but Canada’s assisted-dying law was too strict to allow that.

A long-dormant police investigation gives the case new life.

At the Jimmy Buffett-branded community, a hint at how increasingly long-lived species might choose to spend their extra decades.

They work in hotel rooms, Airbnbs and secondhand RVs just over the state line, so that women can give birth on their own terms.

In many parts of America, like Corinth, Miss., judges are locking up defendants who can’t pay—sometimes for months at a time.

A profile of the PR agent who blurs truth for clients like Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly. “If it were a relationship, we’d call it gaslighting, but it’s a profession, so we call it PR.”

The world’s largest jewelry retailer was a cesspool of harassment and unfair treatment of women who worked there.

A man named Tristan Beaudette was killed while camping in Malibu Creek State Park with his two young daughters. For residents, it became a true crime sensation. But for his family, it was something very different.

One teammate made tennis his whole life. The other had a grandfather whose company invented Hot Pockets. Guess which one went to Georgetown as a Division I recruit.

Match Group, which owns most major online dating services, screens for sexual predators on Match—but not on Tinder, OkCupid or Plenty of Fish. A spokesperson said, “There are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products.”

In Aug. 2008, the U.S. military called in an airstrike on its own security guards in Afghanistan. Dozens of children were killed.

After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious.

The Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918 reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

An Eastern Airlines shuttle to Boston 50 years ago started out routine. It ended up changing how America flies.

How a fearsome, fast-talking union boss became a leading figure in cannabis legalization while shaking down the very people he was supposed to be helping.