Wags Lending and the brave new world of of financing in “niches where we’re dealing with emotional borrowers.”

Despite what dementia has stolen from the cerebral creator of Deadwood, it has given his work a new sense of urgency.

The story of an aviator-adventurer draws a journalist into a reflection on his own family’s history of flight.

How the feds went after Thick Neck, Guilty, Stomper, Gunner, Lucky, Menace, and the rest of the Amernian mob in Los Angeles.

The political maneuvering behind the growth of massive consumer goods warehouses and the health hazards that often follow.

Fifty years later, the men who stole priceless gems from the Museum of Natural History recall the crime.

The story of John Laroche, which led to Orleans’ The Orchid Thief, and tangentially, the film Adaptation.

From pinball prohibition in 1940s NYC to Dave & Buster’s, the rise and fall of the American arcade.

Spending time with the Tonya Harding Fan Club in the wake of the assault on Nancy Kerrigan.

Henry Luce and Time vs. Harold Ross and The New Yorker. What was at stake in the epic magazine rivalry of the 20th century?

Alumni report in secret on Delphian, the mysterious boarding school that Scientology built in the mountains of Oregon.

A stroll through Tokyo’s Tsukiji, the world’s largest seafood market, and the mecca of the global sushi trade.

Two percent of humans can hear the Hum, a mysterious, low rumble in the distance. It might exist. It might be imaginary. It might be both.

How we respond to the rules of the road offers insight into being human.

For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.

Once the pirates were in control of the Lynn Rival, they ransacked it, flinging open cupboards, eating all of the Chandlers’ cookies and stealing their money, watches, rings, electronics, their satellite phone and clothes. There were now 10 men; two more pirates had scampered onboard to join the others. After showering and draining the Chandlers’ entire supply of fresh water, they started trying on outfits. A broad-shouldered buccaneer named Buggas, who appeared to be the boss, was especially fond of their waterproof trousers, parading up and down the deck wearing them, while some of the other pirates strutted around in Rachel’s brightly colored pants and blouses.

The author of The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, interviewed by his editor, Andy Ward, about storytelling, literary heroes, and why the book took him 10 years to write.

“In the recent history of American music, there’s no figure parallel to Lehrer in his effortless ascent to fame, his trajectory into the heart of the culture — and then his quiet, amiable, inexplicable departure.”

The former chancellor of New York City schools was not, in fact, “a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.”

How a serial killer and his teenage accomplice used listings for “the job of a lifetime” to lure their victims, all down-and-out single men, to the backwoods of Ohio.

From a childhood in the Kremlin to a trip to New Delhi carrying the ashes of her Indian Communist lover, defection at the U.S. Embassy… “finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.”

On the scene of the darkest games in Olympics history.

Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.

Trolls are frustrating, cruel and frightening creatures of the internet deep. But something surprising happens when one writer tries to deal with the worst of hers: He turns out to have a conscience.

A profile of Jimmy Connors on the eve of the 1978 U.S. Open. His legendary confidence, honed by his mother since childhood, was in free-fall. (He would go on to win the final in straight sets.)