Longreads

President Obama's reelection campaign brought 40 engineers into their ranks to build the technology they needed to get the president reelected. This is the very human story of how they helped out,…

A few weeks ago, ESPN columnist Sarah Phillips concluded her weekly "Junk Mail" column with a question from an unnamed reader: Rumor has it "Sarah Phillips" isn't a real person and this column is…

Who are these companies and what do they want from me? A voyage into the invisible business that funds the web. This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing…

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the cloudremote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and…

When the pilotless, wing-shaped warplane lifted off a runway at Californias Edwards Air Force Base for the first time on the morning of April 27, it was like the resurrection of the dead. The…

For the last three years the man had been held captive in a brick-and-tin shed just a few minutes’ walk from where the farmers were drinking tea. The marks on his arms weren’t the tell-tale signs of heroin addiction; they came from where his captor, a ruthless modern-day vampire and also a local dairy farmer and respected landowner named Papu Yadhav, punctured his skin with a hollow syringe. He had kept the man captive so he could drain his blood and sell it to blood banks. The man had managed to slip out when Yadhav had forgotten to lock the door behind him.

By George Dohrmann with David Epstein

Aerial view of the BP oil spill site off the coast of Houma, La., on July 13, 2010. (Melanie Burford/ProPublica) A version of this story was…