A report from the KKK’s 2012 Faith and Freedom conference in Arkansas:

It's quite disconcerting in this modern age to be in a room full of white people who are all spouting the most vile racist slurs that one can imagine, openly, while everyone else laughs and applauds it. There is a Twilight Zone feeling to it, as if you'd stumbled into a secret clubhouse where white people can say those forbidden things—the Valhalla of dumb racist jokes.

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

In 2009, Condé Nast allowed this story to appear in print but refused to publish it online or distribute it in Russia for fear of retribution. The story, which details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings that allowed Vladimir Putin’s rapid ascension to power, is reprinted on Longform courtesy of the author.

A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.

The story of Max Factor, a Polish immigrant who revoltuionized Hollywood cosmetics starting in the 1920s, and his “Beauty Calibrator” machine.

What led to the death of a 5-year-old boy, “the Everychild in the state system.”

A final visit with late boxer Teófilo Stevenson, who could have fought or even been Muhammad Ali had he not stayed in Cuba.

Untangling the aftermath of a United States drone strike in Yemen.

A profile of the highest-paid female executive in America, who was born male.

The profile of a 34-year-old woman named Charity Johnson who tricked people all over the country into believing she was still in high school.

The writer is reluctantly whisked away to to a small house in upstate New York to attend an ayhuasca ceremony with six strangers.

Monaco’s richest woman was shot in ambush outside a hospital. Her heirs stand to inherit over a billion dollars each.

A judge on the history and injustice of the plea bargain in America.

Sex and status disclosure in the age of Grindr and undetectable HIV-levels.

How one woman is monitoring the jihadi network from a home office in Montana.

In the 1970s, Chile was on the verge of developing sophisticated technology to monitor its economy. Then America intervened.

On William Cockford and his 1800s gambling hall in London, where much of the British aristocracy lost its fortune.

The disappearance of the mysterious “Pakistani asset” that helped the CIA zero in on Bin Laden.