How Gary Gygax, a semi-employed shoe repairman, built and lost the Dungeons & Dragons empire.

Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube.

How CREW and MUSTIE decide what books stay in a library's circulation.

In appreciation of meaningful, ubiquitous, enduring applications.

Previously: Paul Ford on the Longform Podcast.

On the fast food workers of St. Louis.

"For 20 beautiful years, my homeland was open and (kind of) free. Now, I fear, it’s closing back up."

Previously: Keith Gessen on the Longform Podcast.

An essay on how to turn a sizable book advance into a sizable debt.

After eight women are murdered in Louisiana, what was initially thought to be the work of a serial killer becomes something much more troubling.

An ambivalent look at Google Glass, the “Model T of wearable computing.”

An essay on dick culture.

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?

A cultural history of Bitcoin and what happened when the nascent virtual currency began to be covered by the mainstream media.