A profile of a young Steve Prefontaine.

A 16-year-old runner, her coach and the lasting memory of an improbable race.

The strange case of Kip Litton, road race fraud.

On the world’s longest foot race, which takes place entirely within Queens.

He rose from poverty to fame as a marathon champion at only 23. But was his fall from a balcony outside of Nairobi murder, accident, or suicide?

A profile of 101-year-old marathoner Fauja Singh.

At age 17, Bonnie Richardson won the Texas state track team championship all by herself. Then she did it again.

In Mexico’s remote Copper Canyon, the Tarahumara Indians party hard, get by on a diet of carbs and beer, and can still run 100-mile races, even in their 60s.

His brain and body shattered in a horrible accident as a young boy, Bret Dunlap thought just being able to hold down a job, keep an apartment, and survive on his own added up to a good enough life. Then he discovered running.

The the incredible story of Rick Wershe, an infamous teenage drug dealer in 1980s Detroit who flew in kilos of cocaine and was arrested at 17. Still incarcerated, Wershe now claims he was working with the FBI all along. Was one of Detroit’s most notorious criminals also one of the feds’ most valuable informants?

Available free, only in the Longform App.

What do you do when you think a family member is a murderer? Step one: stop letting her make you dinner.

The story of Frank Bourassa, the world’s most prolific counterfeiter.

He has a staff of 300. His website gets more traffic than Gawker and has 300,000 paying subscribers. He has a clothing line, a string of bestselling books, a movie studio and a radio show syndicated on 400 stations. A profile of Glenn Beck, mogul.

Scrutinizing the gluten-free craze.

Along for the ride with a boatload of refugees risking their lives.

The haunted past of Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama neurobiologist who shot six colleagues during a staff meeting.

Heartbreak at the edge of the earth.

“Oh, my God. This is going to be a huge one.”

“Shark Week” • “Difficult Women” • “Private Practice”

“Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It’s a surprise, to us all. The Embassy of Cambodia!”

Why medical bills are killing us. [sub req’d]

David Letterman weathers a sex and extortion scandal.

Johnny Carson, profiled at the top of his game.

An out-of-character conversation.

A profile of Kimmel published just after he got the late-night job.

A writer for Conan O’Brien on how The Tonight Show really ended and on how his boss got screwed

Steve Allen, the original host of The Tonight Show, in his cranky, later years.

The Spanish police believed he was a missing American teen. So, seemingly, did the Texas family who had lost him three years prior. Who they had actually found was Frédéric Bourdin, was a 23-year-old Frenchman on the run.

He was an 18-year-old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad started contacting her. No one was who they claimed to be.

For nearly a decade, Laura Albert lived a double life as troubled teen turned cult writer JT LeRoy, writing books, chatting constantly with celebrities, and convincing another woman to appear as JT LeRoy in public.

Jerry Joseph showed up in a small Texas town seemingly out of nowhere, produced a birth certificate that said he was of age, and quickly became a star for the local high-school basketball team. It was a role he’d played before.

The story of Alan Young, a career con whose go-to move was to pose as a member of the Temptations and smooth-talk his way into luxury hotel rooms and limo rides.

When a man named Clark Rockefeller snatched his daughter during a custody dispute, what the D.A. called “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career” unraveled.

Excerpts from Live From New York, an oral history of SNL.

SNL in its grim 20th season through the lens of first-year (and only-year) cast member Janeane Garofalo.

A pre-30 Rock profile of Tina Fey.

Eight years removed from the show, Murray was at the peak of his box office power and living in a secluded farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley.

How one of the most maligned cast members in SNL history ended up a talking head on Fox News.

A sweeping, honest interview published just before Murphy announced he wouldn’t host the Oscars included his first public comments on SNL in years.

Dispatches revealing the March 1968 murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission on a rumored Viet Gong stronghold, often referred to in military circles as Pinkville, actually the village of My Lai.

How the racism of white players and coaches ruined the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals.

An eyewitness account of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

On Van Morrison’s grounbreaking album, which was released in November 1968.

From the Apollo 8 flight journal.

The speech Martin Luther King, Jr delivered the day before he died.

A young couple’s story.

On a child diagnosed with autism.

The long, happy, surprising life of 77-year-old Donald Gary Triplett, the first person ever diagnosed with autism.

Should autism be celebrated? A look at the neurodiversity movement.

Autistic individuals have great difficulty breaking into many professions. One exception may be computer programming, where the difficulty of forming emotional attachments and communicating is not necessarily a problem.

As part of his obsessive search for evidence of UFOs, Gary McKinnon worked his way into thousands of government computers. The U.S. charged him with terrorism. Doctors diagnosed him with Asperger’s.

Just over a decade ago, Specter set out to answer this question: How did Lance Armstrong manage the greatest comeback in sports history?

An academic ghostwriter explains his trade.

In 1969, the sports establishment was wrestling with whether to embrace performance-enhancing drugs, decry them, or look the other way.

AshleyMadison.com and the business of infidelity.

The story of the MIT Blackjack Team.

A quiz show scandal and its aftermath, as told by its star.

There are enough stories about steroids in baseball to fill an entire collection. But there’s only one story about steroids and trying to interview a down-and-out Jose Canseco.