While war raged across Afghanistan, expats lived in a bubble of good times and easy money. But as the U.S. withdraws, life has taken a deadly turn.

“I probably am mellowing. I’m happy about that. I was a pretty angry young man, but if I were angry now, it’d be like, What the fuck is my problem? I’ve got a really terrific life. It’s so rare to be an artist in my position.”

A young black gentrifier gets lumped in with both groups, often depending on what she’s wearing and where she’s drinking. She is always aware of that fact.

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.

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

The director on Obama, the state of black cinema, the Knicks, the Nets, the tragedy of public education in America, gentrified New York and why he lives on the Upper East Side.

Ty Cobb, who would go on to be the greatest baseball player of his time, was a 17-year-old minor league prospect when his mother shot and killed his father at home in Georgia.

Far outside of Juarez, villagers in rural areas are trapped without supplies or protection as rival cartels attempt to starve each other out of ranch hideouts. A heavily armed convoy attempts to deliver pensions behind siege lines.

A ragtag band of pirate-Jihadists grab Americans from a diving resort in the Phillipines and lead them on an odyssey through the jungles of an archipelago with the competing interests of the Phillipines’ Navy and Army, the U.S. Military, and the C.I.A. thwarting their rescue.

An Oklahoma rehab center puts defendants to grueling, dangerous work in a chicken processing plant. They receive neither pay nor treatment for their addictions.

“Most of us should be in jail for the things we do. We just haven’t been caught. No one’s gone after us.”

In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African-Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle shows why.

The author survives a bite by a venomous snake in a remote area of Yosemite National Park.

My leg, from toe to hip, turned black and yellow and eventually swelled to 24 inches, more than twice its normal circumference.

After sitting alone in a forest and not moving for 24 hours, the author reflects on time, mortality, and turning 40.

Sex in the Olympic Village.

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.

Dozens of military contractors, most of them Black, have been jailed in the emirate — some on trumped-up drug charges. Why has the American government failed to help them?

When COVID-19 surged through a North Dakota community, a battle with the pandemic became a battle among its residents.

The real-life events that inspired the new Richard Linklater dark comedy Bernie:

It’s a story about people believing what they want to believe, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. It’s a story about people not being what they seem. And it’s a story, as the movie poster says, “so unbelievable it must be true.” Which it is. I know this because the widow in the freezer was, in real life, my Aunt Marge, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, my mother’s sister and, depending on whom you ask, the meanest woman in East Texas. She was 81 when she was murdered, and Bernie Tiede, her constant companion and rumored paramour, was 38. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2027, when he’ll be 69.

Deep in the jungle, the tourists were targetted, but only the porters were hacked by the machetes. Was it a robbery? Or a deeper pattern of violence amongst ancient tribes?

In early 2012, the bones of a woman and young boy were found near the Arizona-Mexico border. The author investigates who they were and how they died.

An abridged history of violence in "America's first suburb."

Note: Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

How the U.S. government used a serial con who was caught running a mail-order steroid pharmacy in Mexico to prove that Google was knowingly placing ads for illegal drugs.

A nonconformist pastor sent a colony of Welsh people to Argentina to try to preserve the language in 1865. 150 years later, the traces are still there.

Amazon, America’s most valuable retailer, is “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.”