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A profile of New York Daily News reporter Juan González, who has been working in journalism for more than 30 years, and was an activist during the late ’60s and early ’70s: “‘Some of the editors started quashing my columns,’ says González. ‘They killed two of them and relegated the others to the back pages. […]

“It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’.” —Rudyard Kipling A new reading list from Julia Wick, a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC.

Now happening in America: Police are using civil forfeiture laws to take money and property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime—and police even allegedly threatened to take their children away if they didn’t comply. In the Texas town of Tenaha, police pulled over drivers and used the roadside seizures to fund an […]

On August 11, 2009, 28-year-old David Gimelfarb disappeared while hiking in Costa Rica’s Rincón de la Vieja National Park. His remains have never been found. His parents have spent more than $300,000 searching for him and are still holding out hope: “‘We believe David is alive,’ said Roma, 66, his eyes searching mine to gauge […]

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter who blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. This week’s picks include stories from New York magazine, The Toast, and Medium.

A look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh. The painter was visiting his brother and sister-in-law in Paris weeks before he died of a self-inflicted gun wound: “Vincent was thirty-seven now, an old thirty-seven. After his attacks during the last eighteen months, he had given up on many cherished dreams. In particular, he […]

A prank call by two Australian radio DJs led a nurse in the U.K. to end her life. The story behind the “royal prank” and its tragic outcome: “Southern Cross Austereo moved into damage-control mode upon learning of Saldanha’s death on the evening of Friday, Dec. 7. On Monday, the station released a media statement, […]

Programmer Sergey Aleynikov was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for downloading 8 megabytes of code he worked on from Goldman Sachs’s high-frequency stock-trading system. Financial journalist Michael Lewis investigates how Aleynikov was punished for something only a few people understand, and holds a “kind of second trial” for Aleynikov so he can be […]

The writer visits Stephen King’s prolific family in Maine. King’s wife Tabitha, his sons Joe and Owen, and his daughter-in-law Kelly Braffet are all published authors. His daughter Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist minister and storyteller: “Owen can live with selling fewer books than his brother or father, both of whom set unusually high standards […]