The retired senator Mike Gravel gave two young fans his Twitter password and permission to campaign in his name. It might be a stunt—or the future of politics.

As mainstream news loses its relevance, Allred becomes only more relevant to mainstream news. She’s provided thousands of hours of titillating material that has helped keep cable networks from grinding to a halt. The players come and go. Past clients like Amber Frey and Tiger Woods Mistress No. 1 Rachel Uchitel slip back into obscurity. Scott Peterson rots disregarded on death row in San Quentin, and Woods’s sexual escapades no longer mesmerize. But Allred retains her significance. There are always new victims to premiere and promote, new serial sexual harassers or psychopaths to square off against. In this spectacle of scandal, grisly murder, and celebrity wrongdoing, Allred has made herself the stage manager, the content provider, the indispensable performer.

How a Chinese national, with the help of a suspected spy, disappeared with laptops and hard drives that may have contained sensitive information from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.

Tech investors gave Seth Bannon, co-founder of the seemingly surging startup Amicus, over four million dollars, despite knowing almost nothing about him.

An interview with a woman who works in one of the exclusive hostess bars in Tokyo’s Ginza district, where an elite clientele pay heavily for champagne, whiskey, and conversation, and client-hostess relationships can span decades.

In the ring, Hector “Macho” Camacho was a champ. Out of it, he was a coke-fueled, womanizing wild man, until the appetites that consumed him cost him his life.

Why did Anthony Gatto, the greatest juggler alive—and perhaps of all time—back away from his art to open a construction business?

Previously: Jason Fagone on the Longform Podcast.

An entrepreneurial primer from the founder of 37Signals. “So here’s a great way to practice making money: Buy and sell the same thing over and over on Craigslist or eBay. Seriously.”

Rogue cops in the LAPD Rampart division’s anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) were involved in everything from drug smuggling and bank robberies to, allegedly, the murder of Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace.

How one of the most maligned cast members in SNL history ended up a talking head on Fox News.

A nonconformist pastor sent a colony of Welsh people to Argentina to try to preserve the language in 1865. 150 years later, the traces are still there.

On the border of Utah and Arizona, Mormon fundamentalists have long lived according to their own rules. When a former sect member and his family moved to the town where he’d grown up, they expected a homecoming. What they got was a war.

Founded in 1974, the Raëlian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestrials. Raëlians claim to have cloned the first human being and extol sensuality and pleasure as a path to peace.

How did a pair of young rappers from Scotland, laughed off the stage for their accents, land a deal with Sony and start partying with Madonna? They pretended to be American.

An excerpt from Night of the Gun, the memoir by New York Times media critic David Carr about his years as a junkie in late-‘80s Minneapolis.

Fifteen years ago, Sherry Turkle developed a little crush on a robot named Cog. Since then, the MIT professor has been studying our ever-increasing emotional reliance on technology. She’s not optimistic about where we’re headed.

A visit to the American base in Antarctica, an “open-air museum of prefabricated regret.”

The aftermath of a childhood filled with subway flashers, teachers who asked for hugs, and boys who joked about your breasts.

Five years after the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter.

“The cowboy hats, target practice, and barbecue brisket were just a bonus. They were really there for the deregulated electrical grid.”

The system for testing pharmaceuticals in the US relies on contractors adhering to strict guidelines. But one of them chose profits over protocols.

A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.

Steven Levy’s piece on cypherpunks and Internet libertarians could not feel more relevant in the wake of WikiLeaks’ rise and the heavily scrutinized role of online organizing in recent revolutions. During Wired’s first year, I’d just gotten an Internet account and had somehow stumbled on the magazine. It became my guide to this hybrid life that we all live now, half-online, half-offline.

-A. Madrigal

A former ambassador to China and potential 2012 GOP candidate on the power of optimism:

Remember others. The greatest exercise for the human heart isn't jogging or aerobics or weight lifting – it's reaching down and lifting another up. Find a cause larger than yourself, then speak out and take action. Never let it be said that you were too timid or too weak to stand by your cause. Learn what it feels like to give 100 percent to others. It’ll change your life.