How the “Apple of Pot” collapsed.

In the film bullets approach in slow motion a series of glistening roundels, resembling condoms just taken out of their paper wrappings. Most of the bullets go right through, leaving a clean hole. But the last roundel in the film collapses slowly, wrapping itself around the bullet like a blanket on a laundry line hit by a wayward football. It is a piece of artificially bred human skin, reinforced with eight layers of transgenic spider silk, the material spiders produce to spin their webs.

Translated from the original Dutch, exclusive to Longform.org.

“I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”

From Southie to Santa Monica, a gangster romance on the run.

How a Mossad agent’s desperate bid to jumpstart his career led to the exposure of two top Hezbollah plants.

Will LaFever never felt right in the world. So he took to the Utah desert, barely making it out alive.

“Remember why we’re here: to empower the child. If you can’t handle it, keep your shades on.”

On the trail of Austin Tice and the late James Foley, freelance journalists who were kidnapped in Syria in 2012.

The railroad foreman’s brain was pierced by a tamping iron. He lived to tell the tale.

What the neighborhood of Higher Blackley in Manchester says about “one of the least understood and most discriminated-against groups in society.”

Erik Weihenmayer has climbed Mount Everest, raced across the Moroccan desert, and is about to kayak the Grand Canyon’s deadliest rapids—all without being able to see.

How modernity – and an eruption of violence – changed “the most remote inhabited island on the Atlantic seaboard.”

Each year, thousands of people pay to play eighteen holes of golf at Angola, “the largest maximum-security prison in the country.”

The rise of One Direction fanfiction that imagines the band members in relationships – with each other.

Behind the tabloid story of the “murder orphan” in Queens.

On the culture of misogyny and abuse at one of the nation’s largest megachurches.

We know the country music pioneer died New Year’s Eve, 1953. But how?

A self-published author of pick-up guides visits the “pacifist nanny state” of Denmark and finds the social safety interferes with his seduction strategies.

Thoughts on the current era of online anonymity.

On Baylor’s freshman basketball star Perry Jones and how the new era of one-season careers has changed the landscape of college basketball.

The barbaric brutalization of Abner Louima and the tragic fate of a handful of flawed Brooklyn cops.

In 1960, beer heir Adolph Coors III was kidnapped and murdered. A look back at the crime and the man who committed it.

On the economics of the booming Somali pirate business, which is up 177 percent over last year.

A profile of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Workweek.

In Silicon Valley, up all night coding in the dorms with the aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs of tomorrow.