Banned in Russia and cut by Condé Nast from the GQ website, this story (presented in full) details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings, blamed on Chechens, that allowed Putin to rapidly ascend to power.

In staying, I was not only denying myself the chance at true happiness, but I was keeping him from having it, too. It was that realization—that I was preventing my husband from having the life he deserved—that ultimately outweighed the fears I had about leaving.

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

“He’d gotten hold of this notion that one times one doesn’t equal one, but two. He began writing down his logic, in a language of his own devising that he calls Terryology. He wrote forward and backward, with both his right and left hands, sometimes using symbols he made up that look foreign, if not alien, to keep his ideas secret until they could be patented.”

"Caught between the dealers and the cops in Hazleton, Pa., is a woman with a bad habit."

Previously: Susan Dominus on the Longform Podcast.

“This is a story about the most magical, mystical sport on earth, and the Detroit lifer who improbably became its king. Also, it’s about an art heist.”

Twelve columns about the boxer’s descent, originally published in the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times.

On September 28, 1980, the Washington Post published a story by an ambitious young reporter about an 8-year-old boy addicted to heroin. The story won a Pulitzer. The boy didn’t exist.

She was last seen leaving a pickup bar, her body was found the next morning in the dirt beside a football field. He was ten. Thirty-six years later, the author investigates his mother’s murder.

Twenty-four years ago, a Missouri father plunged a needle filled with HIV-positive blood into his son’s vein. No one at the time could’ve imagined anything worse. But even more astonishing is the life the son turned out to live.

All aboard the maiden voyage Rob Gronkowski’s party cruise.

In eight minutes, Miashah Moses took out the trash and a blaze consumed the apartment where her nieces were watching television. What happened, and who’s to blame?

The trendy DIY teen hip-hop genre went from a goofy punch line to the preposterously lucrative engine driving a whole new golden age in the music biz. But, wow, is it messy.

How the Ebola virus works.

A trip to The Villages, a booming retiremement community outside Orlando, where the golf is free, casual sex is everywhere, and there is no cemetery.

On working in a war zone to pay the bills.

Thirty-one years ago, Joy Hunley’s daughter was adopted. At least that’s what the paperwork says.

The 22-year-old rapper on escaping North Long Beach and his desire to be a “regular” guy.

Joanne the Scammer has celebrity fans and a massive YouTube following. Branden Miller barely leaves his Daytona Beach apartment.

The gospel according to nine-year-olds; a missionary group that won the right to evangelize in schools and how children process their message.

In 1902, a poet attempts to stage the world’s first “perfume concert.”

The author gets a crash course in health care pricing after having his urethra fixed.

On the controversial British newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins.