For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself.

Franklin Chang Díaz immigrated to the U.S. at 18, became an astronaut, tied the record for most spaceflights, and now might hold the key to deep space travel.

Pope Benedict XVI’s post-retirement presence in the Vatican has set the stage for a conflict that threatens to split the Catholic Church into two.

How a member of a breakaway Mormon sect teamed up with a Lambo-driving, hard-partying tycoon to bilk the government for hundreds of millions of dollars.

When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there.

Basketball is considered one of the most difficult sports to effectively bet on, therefore gamblers like Haralabos Voulgaris who make a handsome living on NBA lines are a rare breed, whose knowledge of the game and personal statistical databases rival most of the league’s front-offices’.

When the apocalypse comes, survivors (and aliens!) will be happy that Martin Kunze built this place.

In southwest Florida, the Myakka River Valley—a place of mystery and myth—is under threat of development.

Alex Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he’d spent his whole life.

Scenes from Madonna’s first major tour and an author struggling to explain the 26-year-old’s massive, surging appeal.

In the midst of a tribal burial, Jim Thorpe’s third wife burst in to remove his body, setting in motion a decades-long battle over the Native American athlete’s final resting place.

Margaret Keane’s husband stole credit for her iconic paintings, basking in fame and fortune that should have been hers for years. Then she told a reporter the truth.

They’re friends who once vied for the same jobs. Now, as editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, they’re locked in a daily battle for Trump scoops.

Forty years ago, a trio of student teachers created the most popular educational game of all-time.

Mormonism’s past and present.

The rise, fall and stubborn survival of a teenage Internet celebrity who discovered that the real world can be a very scary place.

Why the world is becoming less free.

The cover story from the June 2011 print edition of The New Republic, available on the web specially for readers of Longform.org.

Chains, knives, fists, and, of course, those crude and unreliable homemade affairs called zip guns were the staples in the more vicious gang wars in the 1940s and 1950s. Today there is scarcely a gang in the Bronx that cannot muster a factory-made piece for every member—at the very least, a .22-caliber pistol, but quite often heavier stuff: .32s, .38s, and .45s, shotguns, rifles, and—I have seen them myself—even machine guns, grenades, and gelignite, an explosive. One gang, the Royal Javelins, has acquired some walkie-talkie radios.

A hundred and fifty years ago, slightly more, a strange notion: the dead could be counted. In the Civil War, in the lush fields of the South, Americans first, as a culture, began to imagine death in numbers. Rosters of soldiers, as well as lists of war casualties, were not common practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials feared responsibility for the dead by numbering or naming them, and military leaders felt an accurate count might embolden their enemies.

Can a good mother abandon her child?

In 1943, a young research scientist found a cure for TB. It should have been the proudest moment of Albert Schatz’s life, but ever since he has watched, helpless, as his mentor got all the credit.

On the Republican slate for the 2016 presidential election: “Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure.”

She claimed to be a porn recruiter who just needed to see the women have sex with her photographer once before she could book them for jobs. But she and her photographer were the same person — a freelance tech journalist named Matt Hickey.

An important house in Florida history is for sale, its future uncertain. Some want the historic house preserved, while the racism that fueled the Rosewood riots remains.

How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization.