Life and debt as a young writer in New York.

Ninety grand in debt and wanderlust can be a powerful combination.

A stop on the author’s world tour of economic collapse.

How a comedy writer making $300,000 a year ended up homeless.

They make millions per year but, more often than not, lose it in retirement–78% of former NFL players, 60 percent of former NBA players, and even those in the MLB.

A former head writer for AV Club digs himself deep into debt, then gets out.

Auditing a bankrupt city.

A history of debt, bartering and money.

A profile of Messi.

Pelé as religous experience.

Why Neymar, one of the world’s best talents hasn’t taken the money and run.

The glory days of the New York Cosmos.

Sixty years ago, the U.S. upset England in the World Cup on a goal from Joe Gaetjens. In most countries he would have been idolized. Instead, he was ignored in America and marked for death in his native Haiti.

A field study in Fresno.

A profile of Saunders as Tenth of December was published.

Saunders discusses his process.

Another short story from Tenth of December, one that took Saunders more than a dozen years to complete.

Saunders travels to Dubai; Arab children see snow for the first time, which is made by a Kenyan.

On the virtue of kindness.

In which the lead singer of The Kinks reveals, among other things, his true height.

In praise of the library as the rare “indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”

An aura of exclusion and elitism at Columbia University: “The question is not whether you are a New Yorker, but which New York you live in.”

[Subscription Required] Rebellious teens and their longhaired antics on Sunset Boulevard.

An obituary for the greatest boxing writer of all time.

[Google Books] On a bout of hubris and brawn.

Hungry young men and savage strikes: the most mythopoeic sport of all.

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A seven-day cruise with the controversial “downtrodden millionaire.”

An investigation into the disappearance of a 24-year-old British cruise ship activity director from the Disney Wonder opens the strange and insular world of cruise employees, who vanish mysteriously at alarming rates.

After losing a presidential election, 600 National Review subscribers hit the Caribbean.

The sinking of the Costa Concordia.

On board the Perl Whirl 2000, a conference of hard-coding geeks on a luxury cruise ship.

The Estonia was carrying 989 passengers when it sank in 30-foot seas on its way across the Baltic in September 1994. More than 850 perish.

Two thousand rednecks on the Chillin’ the Most Cruise.

The motley gang of L.A. teens that cat-burgled celebrities, sometimes repeatedly, in search of designer clothes, jewelry, and something to do.

Film: The Bling Ring

An orchid-enthusiast goes to battle in Florida.

Film: Adaptation

Nearly 20 years after its publication, the author revealed that this story, on the disco scene in Brooklyn, was a fake.

Film: Saturday Night Fever

The man who blew the whistle on big tobacco.

Film: The Insider

Adventures in bartending.

Film: Coyote Ugly

Six young men, a boat, and the worst gale in a century.

At age 22, the author went undercover at his old high school. Here’s what he found.

A young Brooklyn man attempts a bank robbery to finance his lover’s sex change surgery.

Film: Dog Day Afternoon

Hanging with surfer girls in Maui.

Film: Blue Crush

Drag racing in New York.

Film: The Fast and the Furious

At 25, Stephen Glass was a reporter wunderkind, regularly filing incredible pieces for the largest magazines. When suspicion fell on his sources, things started to really get strange. It wasn’t just sources and organizations he was inventing, but whole stories.

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran.

Film: Argo

The Spanish police believed he was a missing American teen. So did the Texas family who had lost him three years prior. But he was an adult Frenchman. And he had done it before.

He joined the right clubs, married the right woman, worked the right jobs, bought the right art. But the life Clark Rockefeller created wasn’t his. Neither was his name.

For nearly a decade, Laura Albert lived a double life as troubled teen turned cult writer JT LeRoy, writing books, chatting constantly with celebrities, and convincing another woman to appear as JT LeRoy in public.

The hidden, humble beginnings of a New York City blueblood.

For years, Alan Young has made a living off what he says is his only skill: pretending to be a member of The Temptations.

The story of a young man who got to be a high school basketball star. Twice.

A well-crafted, in-depth profile of anarchist and Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond, who broke into the private intelligence company Stratfor and released millions of its e-mails. How does a talented kid from suburban Chicago end up facing federal charges in New York for hacking a company in Texas—and why did it seem worth doing? This piece provides a few answers.

I wrote this one, but I’m including it anyway because it was based on full transcripts of two FBI interrogations of suspected cybercriminals and provides a unique glimpse of exactly how agents talk and act when investigating internet crime. Sample quote: “The FBI does not fly us out here and we don’t break into your door to talk to you if we don’t have a substantial amount of evidence against you.” It also features one of the craziest (and poorly executed) blackmail plots you’ll ever find.

Swatting—faking phone calls to local cops in an effort to have them send a SWAT team to a victim’s home—has become a national problem, with hundreds of cases a year. This 2008 piece profiles one of the most extreme swatters, a young blind kid from Boston.

The recent revelations that the new Miss Teen USA was being surreptitiously watched by a hacker accessing her computer’s webcam stirred up renewed interest in the practice. Using Remote Administration Tools (RATs), hackers with minimal skill can now infiltrate the webcams, microphones, and files of computer users around the world—and whole forums exist in which the hackers share techniques and pictures of their “slaves.” This piece profiles one of the highest-profile hackers caught to date, a disabled California man called Luis Mijangos. What really sets the story apart is the author interview with Mijangos, who explains why he did it.

What happens when a nation-state embraces the techniques of criminal hackers to target Iranian centrifuges? You get a custom-made virus like Stuxnet, for one thing, and this piece explores the virus, its operation, and its discovery.<hr>Longform is proudly sponsored this week by The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed. Buy it today.

A profile of Richard Avedon published early in his career.

A profile of Grace Coddington, creative director of Vogue and break-out star of The September Issue.

A profile of André Leon Talley, an “imposing, if improbable, fashion landmark.”

A profile of Anna Wintour.

A profile of teenage fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson published before she launched Rookie.