Nearly a decade ago, Marie Calloway’s debut book, what purpose did i serve in your life, thrilled and repulsed readers. Then she vanished from public life. I tried to find her.

Sunken by grief, Alenka Artnik found herself alone on a bridge, contemplating suicide. Ten years later, she is the world’s greatest female freediver and getting stronger with each record-breaking plunge. How one woman emerged from mental health struggles to push the limits of the human body.

The very complicated life of Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who once built a very good golf club.

Update: Grantland has published a pair of responses to the reaction to this story, "What Grantland Got Wrong" by Christina Kahrl and "The Dr. V Story: A Letter From the Editor" by Bill Simmons.

Tracking down 40-odd members of the British band.

It's a Tuesday morning in December, and I'm ringing people called Brown in Rotherham. "Hello," I begin again. "I'm trying to trace Jonnie Brown who used to play in the Fall. He came from Rotherham and I wondered if you might be a relative." "The Who?" asks the latest Mr Brown. "No. The Fall - the band from Salford. He played bass for three weeks in 1978." "Is this some kind of joke?"

While on a string of tour dates opening for Radiohead, interaction between Mark Linkous’ antidepressants and the Rohypnol he took to sleep caused him to pass out. A hotel maid found him the next morning bent into a position where his legs had been cut off from circulation. When they untangled, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure.

What it’s like to work for, compete against, and find out you’re the biological father of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. An excerpt from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

How Service Corporation International corporatized death, driving growth through everything from aggresive acquisitions, volume pricing on caskets and embalming fluid, a “strong flu season,” and pre-selling over $7.5 billion worth of burials.

How to get Americans to “pay $45 to $75 to run for their lives from 1,500-pound, bad-tempered beasts.”

How Roger Ailes raised a ruckus in Putnam County, New York.

An excerpt from The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Country.

From her deathbed, the author’s mother revealed a secret she had kept for 60 years: her true love was not his father, but a man named Angus Zahrt. On his ensuing search for the full story.

How a self-taught doctor from Delhi cornered the black market in kidneys, building one of the world’s most lucrative organ-trading rings, until it all came crashing down.

“There is only one given: On the afternoon of August 16, a 22-year-old from Australia named Christopher Lane, who had come to America to go to college and play baseball, went out running and, without warning or knowing why, was shot to death in Duncan.”

The first known infiltration of the finance fraternity Kappa Beta Phi.

Excerpted from Young Money.

A local reporter set out to profile the celebrated writer. He ended up lampooned in The New Yorker.

Excerpted from Updike.

Fifty years ago, Geraldo Foos bought the Manor House Motel. While his customers had sex, he watched from above and took scrupulous notes. Only three people in the world knew what he was doing: Foos, his wife, and the author.

Scenes from a class conflict playing out between millionaires and billionaires on Hawaii’s Big Island.

How Derrick Hamilton went from wrongfully convicted to legal scholar to free.

Unraveling the case of a Canadian man suffering from schizophrenia, put on trial for murder in New York, but found not criminally responsible in Nova Scotia.

Shirley Jackson wrote 17 books while raising four children — and she couldn’t have had a successful career without them.

Life at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s.

An excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Grammy-winning liner notes describing the rise, fall, and rebirth of Roky Erickson, who founded the psychedelic rock pioneers The Thirteenth Floor Elevators before a charge stemming from a single marijuana joint landed him in a Texas mental hospital.

William Sparkman Jr., a census worker, was found hanging from a tree in rural Kentucky. He was naked, hands bound, with the letters “FED” written across his chest. Inside the investigation into how – and why – he died.

Aside from the wealthiest players, nine out of 10 NFL athletes are likely to be insolvent within 10 years of retirement. A new executive MBA program aims to change that.

How companies and large temp agencies benefit from—and tacitly collaborate with—an underworld of labor brokers, known as “raiteros,” who charge workers fees, pushing their pay below minimum wage.