Barack Obama wanted to endorse gay marriage on his own timetable. Joe Biden had other plans.

On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and vanished without a trace.

Stolen time with the writer as he neared the end.

How Brad Katsuyama, a trader at the sleepy Royal Bank of Canada, discovered that the stock market was rigged and assembled a team to change it.

Adapted from Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.

The creators of some of the most distinctive craft beers in the world are identical twins from Denmark. They also can’t stand each other.

Previously: Jonah Weiner on the Longform Podcast.

How activists are using science to show that someone can be truly attracted to both a man and a woman.

On the coach’s battle with retirement.

How Owen came to communicate again.

In Hollywood’s new blockbuster economy, the actors who portray superheroes are as interchangeable as the costumes they wear.

Why 85-year-old Jacques-André Istel established a town (population: 2) on 2,600 acres in the middle of the Arizona desert (but not before becoming a sky diving legend, among other things).

Why do Syrian civilians in a Turkish camp live in relative luxury?

A tale of ambition, motherhood and political mythmaking in the race for governor of Texas.

In between projects, the director searches for “that next soul-nourishing gig.”

On the Netflix hit drama and its show runner, Beau Willimon.

The improbable life and career of the sculptor-turned-musician.

A profile of Shaun White.

John Aldridge fell overboard in the middle of the night, 40 miles from shore, and the Coast Guard was looking in the wrong place. How did he survive?

A battle against an invasive breed of ants has begun in Texas. It also might be over already.

The journey from a Sudanese refugee camp to an Atlanta police academy.

On the volunteer “Wikipedians” who devote their free time to editing Wikipedia.

A pair of undercover journalists, a boatload of refugees, 200 miles of ocean and a journey that has claimed more than a thousand lives.

On the Kunsthal heist and the murky economics of making money from stolen paintings.

Returning to Forth Worth after two and a half defection years in the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald became friends with a Russian emigre family with a son of his age. After Kennedy was shot, they would be called on to translate the Secret Service interrogation of his young Russian wife.

A profile of former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice, who was fired in April after a video of him berating players went viral.

Seventy years after three of the bloodiest days in U.S. history, the battle continues to bring the missing men home.