"For 20 beautiful years, my homeland was open and (kind of) free. Now, I fear, it’s closing back up."

Previously: Keith Gessen on the Longform Podcast.

Dr. Elisabeth Targ became famous for running scientific experiments that appeared to prove the healing power of faith. Then she got sick and became a test subject herself.

Inside the dark, lucrative world of consumer debt collection.

The bumpy rise of Saturday Night Live’s first star.

The Four Seasons restaurant rose to fame as a place to cut deals and be seen. Then its chauvinistic ways – and, specifically, those of its owner – caught up with it.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

The transcript of chats between Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht and a man he believes to be a Hell’s Angel who agrees to supply “hitters” to carry out 5 assassinations.

Decades after a young nun was murdered, a group of former Catholic high school students begin to suspect that an abusive priest may have been the culprit.

A group of teens allegedly create a violent game with a simple premise: “to knock out a stranger with a single punch.”

“I didn’t realize who my father was. So it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. I wasn’t there believing that I was receiving genius from on high. My father was my father.”

Once a Red Sox hero, Curt Schilling’s loud climb towards right-wing media fame may have cost him a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He doesn’t care.

How one of New York’s major trash haulers does business.

The author survives a bite by a venomous snake in a remote area of Yosemite National Park.

My leg, from toe to hip, turned black and yellow and eventually swelled to 24 inches, more than twice its normal circumference.

Barack Obama and a tradition of letter-reading.

Ankle bracelets are promoted as a humane alternative to jail. But private companies charge defendants hundreds of dollars a month to wear the surveillance devices. If people can’t pay, they may end up behind bars.

Anand Patwardhan spent decades tracking the rise of Hindu nationalism. And now, under an increasingly repressive government, he holds his screenings in secret.

The fast rise and even faster fall of a trader who bet big with borrowed money.

While many trans athletes have become political lightning rods, nonbinary people like Layshia Clarendon are left out of the conversation. In a sex-segregated sports world, where do they fit in?

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

Federal agencies have long struggled to stop illegal fishing and drug smuggling in the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, it’s only gotten worse.

A two-week island experience involving a 70-year-old interloper, his mannequin girlfriend, a couple of dogs and very little else.

On the railways of China and a trip aboard its latest spectacle, a $32 billion line carrying passengers between Shanghai and Beijing at 170 MPH.

On July 22, 2013, 66-year-old Gerry Largay began hiking a 32 mile section of the Appalachian Trail. She hasn’t been heard from since.

After a Chinese immigrant couple were charged in their daughter’s death, supporters say they’re vulnerable targets of the American justice system.