Longreads

A flock of red-winged blackbirds forms and re-forms over California’s Sacramento Valley. Photo: Lukas FelzmannThe first thing to hit Iain Couzin when he walked into the Oxford lab where he…

i met rielle hunter for the first time the day of our first interview, at her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, though we'd already spoken for some months on the phone. And would continue to, as…

When Wet Hot American…

For this complete-ish oral history in celebration of Wet Hot's 10th anniversary, we asked director and writer David Wain, his cowriter and creative partner, Michael Showalter, and stars including Janeane Garofalo, Paul Rudd, David Hyde Pierce, Elizabeth Banks, and Amy Poehler to reminisce about the shoot, the living conditions, the kids, the notoriously horrendous weather, and the hilarity (and debauchery) that took place off-camera. Throw another log on the soaking-wet campfire—theirs is an epic tale of camaraderie and survival in the heart of Pennsylvania darkness.

Peter Neufeld is the co-director and one of the two founders of the Innocence Project – the organization I mentioned earlier that uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. In addition to trying to free innocent people from prison, he and his colleagues work to improve criminal justice procedures so that fewer mistaken incarcerations occur in the first place. This means Neufeld spends a lot of time telling people that they’re wrong, or that the way they do their work is unjust and dangerously error-prone. As you might imagine, dealing with denial is a de facto part of his job description. When I met Neufeld in his offices in lower Manhattan, one of the first things he did was walk me through the many different stages of denial he routinely encounters. He was quick to point out that not everyone goes through all these stages, or even through any of them: many people working in law enforcement support the work of the Innocence Project and cooperate fully in its efforts to free the wrongfully convicted.

Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times/Contour by Getty Images In my dream, a long-fingered witch was zapping me with heart attacks (Feel that? Feel it coming?), and then, disconnectedly, I was in a car…

In 1986, a young nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in Los Angeles. Police pinned down no suspects, and the case gradually went cold. It took 23 yearsand revolutionary breakthroughs in…