On the importance of skateboarding.

With three shows currently in production, Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee and American Horror Story, is one of the few show runners whose name commands an audience.

Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Texas headquarters of Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, so he started stealing — and got a little carried away.

The murder of an Iranian band in Brooklyn by one of their own.

Previously: Nancy Jo Sales on the Longform Podcast.

Walter Isaacson’s book is long, dull, often flat-footed, and humorless. It hammers on one nail, incessantly: that Steve Jobs was an awful man, but awful in the service of products people really liked (and eventually bought lots of) and so in the end his awfulness was probably OK.

On who will bear the burden of the financial crisis facing cities across America. “Will it be articulated in terms of bond defaults or larger kindergarten classes—or no kindergarten classes at all?”

A visit with John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing, which “changed the way at least two generations responded to art,” just before his death.

Two men died of meth overdoses at the home of a West Hollywood political donor. Dark conspiracy theories abounded— but the truth is even darker

Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon.

The writer of a contentious piece of science fiction, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” drew the internet’s ire. Now she tells her story.

On a makeshift halfway house for down-and-out former wrestlers.

A startup’s rocky search for profitability.

A site for handcrafts flirts with an IPO.

Doping is a problem for equine sports, too.

Training for a Mars mission on a Hawaiian volcano

“It’s basically bankruptcy for profit.”

We’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.

When Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were roommates.

He and I had our differences. I am not inclined to be sentimental about those Arcadian or Utopian days. He didn't approve of my way of running the place. I had complained also that his dog relieved himself in my herb garden. I asked, "Can't you arrange to have him do his shitting elsewhere?"

Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me.

Remembering a relationship through IM.

The West Memphis Three, teenagers who were convicted in 1993 of brutal killings that they certainly did not commit on the basis of local gossip that they were satanists (as evidenced by Metallica fandom), suddenly found themselves released this summer after over 17 years in prison. But what life awaited them?

An interview with Lawrence Schiller, himself one of the great interviewers of his time, whose research fueled Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.

Aleksander Doba has spent a great deal of time alone, naked and blistered, aboard a very small boat in the middle of the ocean. It is his favorite thing to do.