What will it take to find the biggest missing object in our solar system?
Search results
The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People
A headline-grabbing murder-for-hire plot helped expose the dark side of exotic animal ownership in the U.S. Is there now enough momentum to reform the industry?
We All Die In the End, But Our Skin Looks Great: A Reading List
Are you happy and well-rested, or did you just find a great new snail collagen sheet mask?
End of Discussion
There’s no such thing as a 140-character exegesis: the (non)-discourse around “Joker” is the latest to prove that social media is designed for emotion, not dialogue.
Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
Our top picks of the year, all in one place.
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
Putin’s Rasputin
Journalist Amos Barshad meets with “Putin whisperer” Aleksandr Dugin to try to understand how a shadowy advisor exerts influence.
The Blood of the Crab
Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel — biomedical companies bleed 500,000 of them every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved?
In the Age of the Psychonauts
Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.
Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia
History may have pigeonholed her as Renaissance Italy’s most notorious seductress, but it’s high time we give the Duchess of Ferrara a closer look.

