How a tattooed video store clerk with a history of drinking and drug use ended up at an Islamic self-help class leading to the birth of ISIS.

On Dec. 18, 2007, the school board in Pinellas Country, Florida, voted to abandon integration. They justified the decision with bold promises: Schools in poor, black neighborhoods would get more money, more staff, more resources. They delivered none of that. A 5-part investigation.

When cops kill civilians, their union is on hand to defend them. In many cases this has come at the expense of the truth.

The idea was to shoot a Neiman Marcus fur catalog in the Andes mountains, not get stranded on them.

Memories of the author’s teenage years, when his father pulled up stakes on a comfortable life in Baltimore to reinvent himself as the head of a S&L bank in Los Angeles.

“If 4chan sounds trivial, that’s because it is. The site certainly doesn’t make much money…In fact, you could say that 4chan has cornered the market on the trivial on the Internet, which is no small feat (the trivial usually spreads by accident on the Web, according to no logic).”

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

An investigation by ProPublica, PBS Frontline and NPR has found that medical examiners and coroners have repeatedly mishandled cases of infant and child deaths, helping to put innocent people behind bars.

To this day, no one (outside of the movie's own crew) knows how the Muppets rode bicycles in The Great Muppet Caper, the classic Henson movie from 1981. In that scene, Kermit stands up on one frog-leg on the seat of his bicycle to impress Miss Piggy, and then the whole gang joins them on their bikes, doing circles and figure eights, singing “Couldn’t We Ride?” It's a wonderful piece of filmmaking, and still a complete delight to watch because the effect relied on the ingenuity and bravado of the puppeteers and crew, not CGI wizardry. Contrast the joy and ebullience of this scene to the elegant chiaroscuro slickness of the post-Henson Muppet Christmas Carol in which we see old fogies Statler and Waldorf, as the Marley brothers, floating in mid air. No viewer is impressed; no one really thinks about it at all. And that's because when a then 29-year-old Brian Henson directed that film, he threw the rules out the window. Statler and Waldorf “float” because Goelz and Nelson, the men working the old guys, were standing behind them during filming and then were removed in post production. It’s an elegant fix—a cutting of the Gordian knot—but it is a complete break with an aesthetic 35 years in the making.

Notes from the campaign trail in Nevada with Ron Paul.

Part of Longform.org’s guide to the 2012 GOP field at Slate.

In the days after 9/11, Mark Stroman went on a revenge killing spree in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan survived and, a decade later, tried to stop Stroman’s execution.

When an exclusive private school discovered a teacher was sleeping with his 17-year old student, administrators did their best to make the problem vanish.

Inside the Afghan Local Police, who are accused of killing and raping villagers, and are believed to be the United States’s last shot in Afghanistan.

Perhaps you didn’t know that in addition to being a very funny writer, Kafka’s life yields a lot of comedy too.

The many lives of Josh Tillman, who on the way to releasing one of the year’s best albums was “a defiant child of God, a broke dishwasher, a successful drummer, a Dionysian shaman, a failed poet, a drug-hoovering spiritualist, and a gleeful prankster.”

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, denies that he was ever in the IRA. The murder of Jean McConville threatened to expose him as a liar.

Rumor had it that a teenager had cut off a man’s penis, and the cops happened to have a murder victim that answered that description. Nothing else lined up.

When Putin suggested to Obama that the White House and the Kremlin speak through an intermediary, he named who he thought was the obvious candidate: his friend Steven Seagal.

Harsh sentences have given us an aging prison population, and all the medical problems that come with age are beginning to choke the system.

Decades after a young nun was murdered, a group of former Catholic high school students begin to suspect that an abusive priest may have been the culprit.

How packaged-food companies like Campbell and Hershey are responding to the backlash against pesticides, preservatives, high-fructose corn syrup, growth hormones, antibiotics, gluten, and genetically modified organisms.

A West Hollywood aesthetician made headlines after allegedly trying to have a business rival killed. But the real story, involving ongoing harassment and a member of the so-called Bling Ring, may be more complicated.

A statistics-based argument that drug pricing, not drug use or law enformencement, is the only way to predict swings in violent crime rates.

Dikembe Mutombo, humanitarian and former NBA center, and oil executive Kase Lawal arrange a ill-fated deal to buy $30 million in gold in Kenya.

A group of teens allegedly create a violent game with a simple premise: “to knock out a stranger with a single punch.”