The subject of a child research experiment tries to get to the bottom of what happened to her.

Not long ago, Rand Paul, opthalmologist and son of Ron, would have been written off as a wacky extremist. Thanks to his Dad and the Tea Partiers, he’s poised to become the most radical member of the U.S Senate.

In the aftermath of a mysterious murder, exploring a part of the story that has received little attention: the young man who lost his life.

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.

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.

In the fantasy and superhero realm, the most chilling and compelling villain of the year was surely Magneto, who in X-Men: First Class is more of a proto-villain, a victim of human cruelty with a grudge against the nonmutants of the world rooted in bitter and inarguable experience. Magneto is all the more fascinating by virtue of being played by Michael Fassbender, the hawkishly handsome Irish-German actor whose on-screen identity crises dominated no fewer than four movies in 2011. Magneto, more than the others, also evokes a curious kind of self-reproach, because his well-founded vendetta is, after all, directed against us.

A profile of Christine Quinn, odds-on favorite to be the next mayor of New York City.

Reverse engineering the details of a murder that took place in St. Louis on Christmas Night in 1895 from over a century of popular song.

The legacy of a secret Cold War program that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers.

He had the mind of a scholar, but he always insisted he didn’t want to be one.

Typee, the most popular book Melville published in his lifetime, was his memoir of Polynesia. Most of it was probably made up.

A Holocaust detective story: could a lampshade pulled from the ruins of Katrina really be Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?

How a burst blood vessel transformed the mind of a deliberate, controlled chiropractor into that of an utterly unfiltered, massively prolific artist.

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.

A telekinetic teenager became a convicted killer. Can a group of strangers prove that Christina Boyer is really a victim of injustice?

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

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.”

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.

Audrey Elrod thought she had found the man of her dreams. Today she is in a West Virginia prison. She’s broke. And the court has ordered her to pay more than $400,000 to victims of the same man who conned her.

Christian Audigier is the man behind Von Dutch and Ed Hardy. The massive succes of his garish and expensive creations may say more about the power of celebrity than about fashion.

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.)

At the height of the 2016 election, exaggerated reports of a juvenile sex crime brought a media maelstrom to Twin Falls — one the Idaho city still hasn’t recovered from.