The preacher ran a prostitution ring out of his halfway house. The teenager posed as his nephew and later claimed he feared for his own life. Only one man they drove into the woods would survive.

In exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to build his own jail, complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23 years later, it’s a home for the elderly.

On the battle between Google, Apple, Uber, and Tesla to own the driverless car market, which could be worth more than $30 billion a year.

The whole thing began over a puddle in the driveway. Eight years later, Peter Nygard and his neighbor Louis Bacon, who own houses next to each other in paradise, have spent tens of millions in a constantly escalating legal war. Neither man spends much time on the island anymore.

The murder of an Iranian band in Brooklyn by one of their own.

Previously: Nancy Jo Sales on the Longform Podcast.

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

Last summer, Gia Allemand took her own life in a New Orleans apartment complex. The first person on the scene was her boyfriend, NBA star Ryan Anderson. This is the story of how he survived.

“Ligurta Station, Arizona. The hottest town in America. It’s 120 in the shade. Can you dig it? Ron can. He’s been out here for the past five years, carving out his own little slice of heaven.”

The world’s most renowned chef, Ferran Adrià, says that the only way he can push forward the art form of cooking is to close his own restaurant.

An investigation into how “Mr. Putin, a student of martial arts, had turned two institutions at the core of American democracy — political campaigns and independent media — to his own ends.”

Ellen Pao recounts her own lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Doug Schifter waged a one-man campaign to stop Uber from putting his fellow black-car drivers out of business. Then he decided to take his own life.

On Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

“Three giant telecoms are gonna make and own all the content, and they’re not gonna want anyone else to make it.”

How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.

As the New York head of a celebrity-favorite megachurch, Carl Lentz achieved stardom. But when a cheating scandal blew up the pastor’s life, congregants were left to question their relationship with a church that cultivated its own kind of fame.

The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.

On Eve Babitz.

Babitz thought she’d die at thirty; she’s now 78 and witnessing her own resurrection. Youth was not wasted on her, and she crammed her life into her sentences.

On Feb. 5, 2019, Maya Moore made an announcement on The Players' Tribune that would upend the WNBA: She would be sitting out the 2019 season to focus on "the people in my family, as well as on investing my time in some ministry dreams that have been stirring in my heart for many years." It was a stunning declaration. This was Maya Moore, in her prime.

Clarence Thomas, then-chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, profiled by Juan Williams:

He agrees with Reagan's characterization of the civil-rights leaders as old men fomenting discontent to justify their own "rather good positions." "The issue is economics—not who likes you." Thomas has told me. "And when you have the economics, people do have a way of changing their attitudes toward you. I don't see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own. Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?"

“Neither of my parents was exactly who I thought they were.”

“I know that, as a white man, I have to hold my fellow white men accountable.”