Reposted after it was pulled by The Atlantic:
How the little known $50/bottle champagne Antique Gold became the $300/bottle Armand de Brignac that Jay-Z “happened upon in a wine shop” and then featured in a video.

A journey into the 1950s.

Twenty-two years in, E-40 has extended his reign over the Bay Area rap landscape by returning to “making music the way he did back in the late ’80s: completely independently, selling his raps more or less directly to his fans.”

How the fashion industry collapsed.

On Ephemerisle, a “floating festival of radical self-reliance,” and other attempts at creating an island utopia.

A profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, whose bestselling memoir may have sunk her literary career.

A battle against an invasive breed of ants has begun in Texas. It also might be over already.

A profile of 21-year-old Dan Cates, who made $5.5 million playing 145,215 hands in 2010.

In 1991, Frank Sterling confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. His story highlights a common – and controversial – method of police interrogation.

What happened when one of San Francisco’s most notorious underworld bosses tried to go clean.

She was not just a poet, she was an “event” in American literature all by herself.

A mission in Baghdad to let a photojournalist get a shot of an insurgent corpse ends up getting a Marine killed.

On China’s modern-day Communist Party and why foundational myths can never be shed.

A veteran black Metro columnist, adrift in a rapidly shifting D.C., rankles an incoming generation of gentrificationists.

Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial Day weekend in Chicago.

A Washington tribe expelled 306 of its members. They’re not going quietly.

A tour of a nonprofit that collects, warehouses, and donates perfectly good stuff hospitals throw away, from anesthesia machines to unopened surgical tools.

An interview with F. Lee Bailey about his 60 years of celebrity trials.

Medical examiners provide crucial insights into public health and safety. What happens when we don’t have enough of them?

In 1989, USC had a depth chart of a dozen linebackers. Five have died, each before age 50.

A mother’s fight to save a Black, mentally ill 11-year-old boy in a time of a pandemic and rising racial unrest.

Thousands of patients report lingering symptoms. Can research into another mysterious syndrome help?

A group of high school students try desperately to make it through an isolated and dire year.

How a bioethicist’s field of study—suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death—”turned unbearably personal.”

How a small group academics revealed an ancient order of opthamologists.