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.

She was a thirteen-year-old from the Chabad Lubavitch community who would dip into a barbershop bathroom to swap her orthodox clothes for those of a streetwalker. Her pimping and rape allegations against a group of black men in their twenties, repeatedly recanted and then reaffirmed, would send the D.A.’s office into disarray.

“The vegan wars are not really about veganism at all, but about how individual freedom is coming into conflict with a personal and environmental health crisis.”

How do you tell the world you are grieving? In my case, it was a year-long Twitter thread about finding the things that made me feel better.

“Transforming into an Administrative Jekyll for a certain amount of time every day limits the amount of time my Creative Hyde can come up with content to market and sell. Luckily, amphetamines have that problem tackled as well: when you’re using them, you don’t have to sleep… at all.”

When your job is to constantly share your life, even your worst moments are an opportunity to please your audience.

The rise and fall of Synanon, an addiction-recovery cult in California, and its charismatic leader, a one-time homeless wino named Chuck Dederich who taught his followers to berate each other for therapy.

How the “genial Bavarian” version of Adolf Hitler became a global media celebrity, “a plain-living gentleman with a soft spot for dogs and children.”

A Barclays analyst leaves for a routine laser treatment and is never heard from again. Ten months later, authorities find her body under a concrete slab at the house of her doctor, who was in fact not a doctor at all.

Marine commanders did not act on dozens of pleas for additional manpower, machinery and time. When a training exercise ended in death, leadership blamed the very men they had neglected.

In the wartime Balkans, an encounter with a solider produced an unwanted baby, a test of international justice, and a decades-long yearning for peace.

Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion.

Armed only with their psychotic courage, they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming, storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.” I listened to 19-year-olds talk nonstop throughout the night we spent in jail, as they howled insults at the officers and swapped stories of humiliation by police. It struck me that they were too young to have seen even the initial phase of BLM. Though well-acquainted with power and violence, they were tasting “politics” for the first time. Whatever the fate of the movement, I suspect that much of their future thinking will be measured against the feelings that filled the nights of 2020: the vastness and immediacy, the blur and brutal clarity.

I remember when you were a little girl, you used to call yourself “peach-brown”. Peach represented your mother, brown represented your father, and together they made peach-brown, a perfect articulation at the time for what you were. The colors came from the crayons you matched to the skin of your parents, and although they were separate and didn’t mix together very well on paper, they were the best you had at the time. This silly little phrase represented what would become a lifelong struggle of coming into your own identity.

"For 20 beautiful years, my homeland was open and (kind of) free. Now, I fear, it’s closing back up."

Previously: Keith Gessen on the Longform Podcast.

Dr. Elisabeth Targ became famous for running scientific experiments that appeared to prove the healing power of faith. Then she got sick and became a test subject herself.

An estimated 70,000 transgender youth lack secure housing. This is what life on the streets is like for six of them.

In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.

The search for the hottest chili.

Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there

In Austin in 1973, politicos and hippies could get together and create violent, visionary horror films for $60,000. So they did. The story of how The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got made.