At 9:14pm on November 22, 1987, sportscaster Dan Roan was doing the Bears highlights on Chicago’s WGN-TV when the station’s signal was hijacked. Someone wearning a rubber Max Headroom mask appeared, silently, on TV screens around the city. A few hours later, Headroom popped up again on another channel, this time for longer and with audio. Despite FBI and FCC investigations, the case remains unsolved.

Why can’t the military fix its violence against women problem? Congress is on the precipice of ushering in the biggest shift in military policy since the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But would it have saved 21-year-old airman Natasha Aposhian?

From 1976 to 1986, one of the most violent serial criminals in American history terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and might still be out there. The author, along with several others, couldn’t stop working on the case.

So you’re surrounded by idiots. Guess who the real jerk is.

The island of Coiba off the coast of Panama is both a nature preserve and an open-air prison.

“The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.”

The prosecutor in the case of hacker turned F.B.I. informant (but still hacker) Albert Gonzales and his organization Shadowcrew : “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

The invention of offshore banking.

In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.

Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.

An American woman's travels and memories of her Russian husband.

Bryan Goldberg’s site for women was widely mocked when it launched a year ago. Today it has 15 million readers per month and some of its harshest early critics are on the payroll.

Al Sharpton wanted to be a civil rights leader in the mold of Martin Luther King, Jr. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

A newly minted, 34-year-old White House budget director gets a little too candid with a reporter profiling him during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. Among Stockman’s many admissions: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

From “Idiocracy” to “Silicon Valley,” the writer and director has established himself as America’s foremost chronicler of its own self-destructive tendencies.

At 90 years old, Lawrence Hill’s mother was ready to end it all on her own terms, but Canada’s assisted-dying law was too strict to allow that.

A profile of the PR agent who blurs truth for clients like Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly. “If it were a relationship, we’d call it gaslighting, but it’s a profession, so we call it PR.”

In Aug. 2008, the U.S. military called in an airstrike on its own security guards in Afghanistan. Dozens of children were killed.

When a Qatari sheikh came to live in L.A., an entire economy sprouted to meet his wishes. “His highness doesn’t like to hear no,” one associate told a professor.

A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.

An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past.

Skinny, sober, happily married, and seemingly full of radiant light, Gucci's become an improbably inspiring public figure, a beacon of serenity and gratitude for positivity-starved times.

Is the genetically engineered chestnut tree an act of ecological restoration or a threat to wild forests?

Brian Chavez was supposed to be the one who made it out of Odessa. It didn’t turn out that way.

The man who brought together heat, yoga, monthly fees to use his methods, and raw sexuality, on allegations that he has slept with scores of his followers: “Only when they give me no choice! If they say to me, ‘Boss, you must fuck me or I will kill myself,’ then I do it! Think if I don’t! The karma!”