The rise of the “wildly lucrative” herbal incense business, and the downfall of one company.

On “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez,who terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco through a string of over 30 home invasion murders starting in 1984 and ending when he was recognized and apprehended by an angry mob.

“The idea for Handybook occurred to me when I was studying at Harvard. It was so hard to find a reliable cleaning service to tidy my apartment! You know?”

In Cleveland, TX, nineteen men and boys gang raped an eleven-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer. This is the story of the victim and her community.

Alex Malarkey co-wrote a bestselling book about a near-death experience. Last week he admitted he made it up. Why wasn’t anyone listening to a quadriplegic boy and a mother who simply wanted to tell the truth?

The relative prosperity of the Putin-era has thrown Russian bride-introduction tours for a loop, as a group of American bachelors learn in a series of Meet and Greets.

Facebook was supposed to open up societies like Cambodia—but instead it has wreaked havoc on the fragile political order and destroyed opposition leadership.

The Berkeley Pit is a gorgeous, toxic former mining site in Montana that’s beloved by tourists. But unless it’s cleaned up soon, it could become the worst environmental disaster in American history.

The writer and his oldest friends reunited to mourn the ones they lost—and honor the time they have left.

 The writer speaks with his father for the first and last time.

My father moved back to Nigeria one month after I was born. Neither I nor my sister Ijeoma, who is a year and a half my elder, have any recollection of him. Over the course of the next 16 years, we did not receive so much as a phone call from him, until one day in the spring of 1999, when a crinkled envelope bearing unfamiliar postage stamps showed up in the mailbox of Ijeoma's first apartment. Enclosed was a brief letter from our father in which he explained the strange coincidence that had led to him "finding" us.* It was a convoluted story involving his niece marrying the brother of one of our mother's close friends from years ago. As a postscript to the letter, he expressed his desire to speak to us and included his telephone number.

On the scene of the darkest games in Olympics history.

Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.

An interview with Steve Albini on art, commerce, and ethic.

Between 1937 and 1973, Earl Johnson served out the sentences on nine felonies, worked for Charlie “Cherry Nose” Gio, became friends with a Soviet spy, and tried to kill “Joe Cargo” Valachi of the Cosa Nostra with a poison dart.

“My father didn’t believe in things that were a reminder of the past because he had never had things in the past, and, more important, he had never had a past—not a past that mattered, that should be passed on to me, his son.”

What did $3M paid to a US consulting firm get Qaddafi? A glowing profile in The New Republic, written by a Harvard professor, who travelled to Tripoli to interview him. On the consulting company’s dime. Which he failed to disclose.

“We’re the fucking establishment now. You and I. We’re not…” the young red hat, encircled by his squad, pantomimed the old establishment with a swaying, limp-wristed dance. “We won. Fuck them.”

Jennifer Warren promised people counseling and recovery for free. When they arrived, she put them to work 16 hours a day for no pay at adult care homes for the elderly and disabled.

The economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus has led to enormous food insecurity across America—even in its richest cities.

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

The author of The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, interviewed by his editor, Andy Ward, about storytelling, literary heroes, and why the book took him 10 years to write.

Mikhail Kalashnikov’s brainchild, Avtomat Kalashnikovais aka the AK-47, is the most stockpiled firearm in the world and has altered the last century like no other product. C.J. Chivers, author of The Gun, discusses.

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

Richard Carr, a retired psychologist who had long dreamed of sailing around the world, was in the middle of the Pacific when he started sending frantic messages that said pirates were boarding his boat. Two thousand miles away in Los Angeles, his family woke up to a nightmare: he might be dying alone, and there was almost nothing they could do about it.

Inside the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan:

The U.S. government has lied to itself, and to its citizens, about the nature and actions of successive Pakistani governments. Pakistani behavior over the past 20 years has rendered the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism effectively meaningless.