More than 100,000 city public school students lack permanent housing, caught in bureaucratic limbo that often seems like a trap. This is what their lives are like.

Shaun MacDonald was an ambitious tech innovator whose start-up was going to revolutionize the crypto economy. His wealthy investors had no idea that their charismatic founder was really Boaz Manor, a notorious Canadian white-collar criminal.

While the virus has ravaged rich nations, reported death rates in poorer ones remain relatively low. What probing this epidemiological mystery can tell us about global health.

When an 11-year-old Black girl in Jim Crow America discovers a seemingly worthless plot of land she has inherited is worth millions, everything in her life changes—and the walls begin to close in.

A reporter watches as a Hindu nationalist government uses tech from the companies he covers to destroy a secular democracy.

He was a shining star of a tight-knit group of rising Black male models in London. Why did he die at the hands of another model?

Jeffrey Fang was a ride-hailing legend, a top earner with relentless hustle. Then his minivan was carjacked—with his kids in the back seat.

In 2003, a man robbed a bank with a bomb around his neck. It exploded shortly thereafter, taking his life and leaving authorities to try to figure out who had put it there.

On Alison Winter’s Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, and issues of memory in the 20th century.

Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper.

Shanghai, in 1989 and 2013. Excerpted from A History of Future Cities.

On the dangerous state of U.K. banks—“an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal”—and how it can be fixed.

In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.

Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.

Marion and Larry Pollard live in the suburbs. They have eight grandkids and a terrier named Bella. They can also expel demons and save your soul.

In Harpersville, Alabama, a traffic violation can lead to months in jail and a never-ending stint in a work-release program – what some refer to as a modern-day debtors’ prison.

Over the past 33 years, Dick Hoyt has pushed, pulled and carried his disabled son, Rick, through more than 1,000 road races and triathlons, including 28 Boston Marathons. But as time bears down on them, how much longer can they keep it up?

What overcrowded and swelling Bangladesh can tell us about how the planet’s population, more than 1/3 of which live within 62 miles of a shoreline, will react to rising sea levels.

She surveyed her former possessions, the stuff of a world now lost. "I'd be happy with just walking away from all of this," she concluded. "Dump it all and just start over. Happy birthday — I'm alive."

On secrets that surprise no one:

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

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.

Al Sharpton wanted to be a civil rights leader in the mold of Martin Luther King, Jr. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

In the age of citizen journalism, smartphones and streaming video, bearing witness to human rights violations is getting easier. Is it also making justice more complicated?