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 1913, Joe Knowles became a media sensation after fleeing into the Maine woods wearing nothing but a jockstrap. Two months and one bear-clubbing incident later, the “Nature Man” returned to civilization as a hero. But was it all hoax?

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.

The story of mediatakeout.com, a gossip site with a monthly audience of 16 million and a loose relationship with the truth.

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.

In an old mine an hour north of Pittsburgh, 600 federal employees manage paperwork for the government’s retirement system. By hand. On paper. Without computers. The same exact way they always have.

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.”

If you hit a bar or restaurant in South Miami, there’s a good chance Eddie Santana has waited tables there. And then sued. Sometimes after only a single day on the job.

I love combing through The Atlantic’s archives. There’s almost no better way of grasping the strangeness of the past than to flip through a general interest magazine from 1960. Here, we find Fred Hapgood grappling with what human intelligence meant in the light of new machines that could do something like thinking. Intelligence was being explored in a new way: by finding out what was duplicable about how our minds work. Hapgood's conclusion was that if you could automate a task, it would lose value to humans. What tremendous luck! Humans value that which only humans can do, he argued, regardless of the difficulty of the task. And that because computers were so good at sequential logic problems, we'd eventually end up only respecting emotional understanding, which remained (and remains) beyond the reach of AI.

-A. Madrigal

On the world’s longest foot race, which takes place entirely within Queens, N.Y.:

Such were the hazards last summer in Jamaica, Queens, at the tenth running of the Self-Transcendence 3,100. The fifteen participants—all but two of them disciples of the Bengali Guru Sri Chinmoy, who has resided in the neighborhood for forty years—hailed from ten countries on three continents. They ran in all weather, seven days a week, from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, or until their bodies compelled them to rest. If they logged fewer than fifty miles on a given day, they risked disqualification. By their own reckoning, the runners climbed eight meters per lap, mounting and descending a spectral Everest every week and a half. They toiled in this fashion for six to eight weeks, however long it took them to complete 5,649 circuits—3,100 miles—around a single city block.

On “American Dream,” a mall under construction in New Jersey that will be the largest on Earth and feature an indoor skiing slope, a tropical area modeled on Hawaii, and a “TV screen that will make Times Square seem like a rec room from the seventies.”

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.

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?

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

How the U.S. government used a serial con who was caught running a mail-order steroid pharmacy in Mexico to prove that Google was knowingly placing ads for illegal drugs.

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.

Joe Namath believes hyperbaric oxygen treatment can reverse the brain damage he and others suffered playing football, so much so that a treatment center carries his name. The science, however, doesn’t support his claims.

“I love stand-ups, and I feel it’s the one thing I know about that I could actually judge, besides people’s morals.”

A father’s attempt to combat the wage gap.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

Lowell Wood helped bring down the Soviet Union, has created what could be the first concussion-free football helmet, and has regular brainstorming sessions with Bill Gates. He also drives a 20-year-old Toyota with 300,000 miles on it.

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.