Stare at the game long enough and the distance between everything—players, league, game, court, self, other—begins to collapse. Everything becomes a metaphor for everything else, the league and your life each generating infinite layers of meaning for the other.

People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it’s a beacon of so much that’s right.

Federal agencies have hired contractors with no experience to find respirators and masks, fueling a black market filled with price gouging and multiple layers of profiteering brokers. One contractor called them “buccaneers and pirates.”

My mother’s eyes traced what was happening with happiness of a child. When she asked my father how it was possible, he thought she was asking about the flowers, but she wasn’t. She was asking how it was possible to see this much beauty at once.

The problems go much deeper than food safety and point to an industry that systematically rewards and enables star chefs while asking few critical questions about the workers who often power their success.

For a rebellious, Korean-American teen like myself who was awkwardly trying to situate himself, without much success, Jackson’s writing, with its rap and jazz references and its relentless, engaging voice, provided a vision of Black agency that felt almost illicit.

Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him.

Covid-19 has cemented the e-commerce giant’s hold on the economy — but it has also spurred employees all around the country to organize.

After 9/11, U.S. authorities used informants to secure hundreds of terror convictions. But did they help create plots where none existed?

A writer tries to understand his dad through the space race.

His almost superhuman exploits made him one of the West’s most feared lawmen. Today, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal is widely believed to be the real Lone Ranger. But his true legacy is even greater.

Those who are incarcerated are suing for their right to gender confirmation surgery—if deemed necessary. Meet the psychiatrist who almost always says it’s not.

Paul Wulff, a college football coach, was only 12 when his mother vanished from their family home. After 41 years of searching, he finally has been able to piece together some details of a mystery that upended both his life and family.

Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro—they’ve all made their way to the Sunshine State, fueling and profiting from a tabloid culture that turns politics into spectacle, arguably Florida’s greatest export.

A call to the Obama White House that some legal experts say is impeachable fits a pattern of the Governor smearing those who scrutinize him.

Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias.

How Bert Schneider, a well-heeled Hollywood producer with a coke problem and a soft spot for radical politics, smuggled Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers who was awaiting trial on a murder charge, into Cuba in 1974.

Shanghai, in 1989 and 2013. Excerpted from A History of Future Cities.

On an artist who’s spent nearly 50 years bending the rules of space and light, and his life’s work, an extinct volcano in Arizona where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974.

On the county fair and casino circuit with Huey Lewis, who at 61 is “part of a select fraternity of musicians who can draw a couple thousand people in dozens (if not hundreds) of middle-American towns … scattered throughout the country.”

Making the case that all Pixar movies exist on a cohesive timeline in the same universe dominated by a central theme: the battle between animals, humans and machines.

The strange saga of Gordon Todd Skinner, a psychedelic aficionado and government informant who is now serving time in prison for kidnapping and torturing his wife’s teenage lover.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, on crying in movie theaters, “attention whores” and David Foster Wallace.

In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.

Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.