An ode to mayonnaise.

A Taliban intelligence chief’s death and resurrection.

A wandering long-distance canoeist goes missing.

Why didn’t we?

The stories that sprung up around if not quite about Trump were as brutal and lazy as the man himself; they teased themselves endlessly from one episode to the next, building toward a brutal grand finale in which America’s heroes would murder its villains, on TV, at some time to-be-determined.

Getting arrested was the best thing to ever happen to Jeremy Meeks.

Christopher Catambrone wants to help illegal migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean in ill-equipped, unsafe boats. But it’s hard to do alone.

An ex-SEAL turns to “ocean therapy” to cope with chronic pain and PTSD.

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.

Alex Malarkey co-wrote a bestselling book about a near-death experience. Last week he admitted he made it up. Why wasn’t anyone listening to a quadriplegic boy and a mother who simply wanted to tell the truth?

When Nazi-sympathizing politician Jorg Haider died in a crash, his 27-year-old protégé Stefan Petzner was left to lead the Austrian far right—and to mourn the boss who he revealed was also his lover.

The nation watched live as Robert O’Donnell rescued Baby Jessica from that well in Texas in October, 1987. Then they stopped watching, and Robert O’Donnell was lost without the attention.

The Berkeley Pit is a gorgeous, toxic former mining site in Montana that’s beloved by tourists. But unless it’s cleaned up soon, it could become the worst environmental disaster in American history.

She moved to Cape Cod to escape the glitzy Manhattan world she born into. The only witness to her murder was her 2-year-old daughter. Everyone she knew, it seemed, was a suspect.

In 1963, a Black politician named Ben Lewis was shot to death in Chicago. Clues suggest the murder was a professional hit. Decades later, it remains no accident authorities never solved the crime.

How Robert Gottlieb quelled a rebellion and saved The New Yorker.

Note: Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

How Leo Sharp got busted.

On driving (and walking) in the Middle East – from Syria to Lebanon, across Saudi Arabia to Dammam, in a taxi through war-torn Beirut.

What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they “grow” their students’ test scores? Colorado is about to find out.

How a musical subculture evolved alongside a technological subculture:

Rave's rise mirrors the Web's in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward "free spaces" with special appeal to geeks and wonks.

One day you’re teaching yourself to play the piano in hotel lobbies, the next you’re contributing a song to a David Lynch soundtrack.

“The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.” –Steve Jobs, 1996

Raffaello Follieri was young, handsome. He was Italian. He was dating Anne Hathaway, hobnobbing with Bill Clinton, and using contacts at the Vatican to launch a lucrative business in the States. Then he was in jail.