On being South Africa’s “public protector,” charged with watching over the people who once liberated it.

Thirty-three years ago, a Chicago man was sentenced to death for murder. In 1999, another man confessed to the crime. Today, they are both free.

The police told Lara McLeod to report her rape. Then they arrested her for lying.

Sheikh Humarr Khan was a globally renowned expert in tropical diseases, and the hero who ran Sierra Leone’s worst Ebola ward. So why, when he finally fell ill, was he denied the extraordinary treatments that could have saved him?

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.

A conversation between the writers Nadifa Mohamed, who left Hargeisa, and Aleksandar Hemon, who left Bosnia.

The author, who works remotely, and her evolving relationship with her physical representation at the office: “an iPad on a stick on a Segway-like base.”

How do you tell the world you are grieving? In my case, it was a year-long Twitter thread about finding the things that made me feel better.

On the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts took it all too far. Neither man was ever the same.

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

Excerpted from Updike.

The author takes a trip to HempCon with her anxious, insomniac, ultra-Orthodox Jewish mother.

On Silicon Valley's newfound interest in the weed business.

Previously: Mat Honan on the Longform Podcast.

Tony Ma will bet you as much as $600,000 to train your student for college acceptance. If the student gets into their top choice school, Ma takes the cash. Rejected? He gets nothing.

The idea was to shoot a Neiman Marcus fur catalog in the Andes mountains, not get stranded on them.

Rumor had it that a teenager had cut off a man’s penis, and the cops happened to have a murder victim that answered that description. Nothing else lined up.

Gerry Pickens took a paycut to join the police department in tiny, overwhelmingly white Orting, Washington. Fired less than a year later, he’s now suing the town for enough to break it.

As it approaches a public offering, how Glencore—founded by the legendary fugitive March Rich—cornered the market for just about everything by working with dictators and spies.

An excerpt from Zak Smith’s We Did Porn detailing an appearance by porn star Sasha Grey on The Tyra Banks Show.

A young journalist’s low-paid odyssey through publications from the Hong Kong iMail to Gawker adrift in the “nothing-based economy.”

Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to connect with viewers, but video games on the topic have broken sales records.

A report from Nevada, where an economy in crisis and a Tea Party upstart are threatening to topple Harry Reid, the most nationally powerful politician in the state’s history.

An interview with Douglas Hofstadter, who after winning the Pulitzer for Gödel, Escher, Bach retreated into the lab and published only sparingly in technical journals, on what it would mean if a program could generate humor and/or masterful compositions.

An oral history.