Five years after they leave the league, 60 percent of NBA players have nothing left. In the NFL, it’s closer to 80 percent after just two years. On the economics of professional sports.

How Aja Newman’s trip to the emergency room uncovered the abusive behavior of “rock star” physician David Newman, who ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual abuse against his patients.

A profile of Little Richard in the last years of his life, confined to a wheelchair and living in the penthouse suite at the Hilton in downtown Nashville.

Chicago’s predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting, but it couldn’t determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime.

An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.

On Westmont College, a “feeder school” to the upper ranks of the Christian conservative movement.

Writing a “stunt memoir” in the waterpark capital of the world.

With the first on the scene of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 disaster.

On the wandering career and sweet baritone voice of Art Laboe, the DJ behind the phrase “oldies but goodies.”

The battle of Wanat—the most scrutinized engagement in the Afghanistan War—seen from three perspectives: a dead soldier, his father, and his commander.

The inside story of how the city, broke and bleak and nearing the edge, saved itself.

In 1992, a magazine story introduced the world to the photographs of Sally Mann. Here, she responds to the firestorm that article produced.

Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the radical activist “beyond the leading edge” of the same-sex marriage fight.

After the explosion of the Columbia shuttle in 2003, two American astronauts aboard the International Space Station suddenly found themselves with no ride home.

The author recalls his time as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The resilience of Marga Griesbach, 92, who made it through the Holocaust, and set off for a cruise around the world in February.

The enduring career of the megastar no one really knows.

“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.)