Tag Archives: long-reads

T he evening of the fight, Nathan Valencia was nervous. It was the first time that Valencia, a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas had participated in Fight Night, the annual event hosted by rival fraternity Kappa Sigma. Like other frat functions, Fight Night …

Ashley Easterling’s son had been missing for 40 days when she says she got a call from a stranger offering to help find him. She dropped off her 30-year-old son, Robert “Alex” Easterling, at an acquaintance’s house in Pickens, Mississippi, on April 20, 2022, and he had not been seen …

E MMA CHAMBERLAIN IS about to go off script. Which, to be clear, is totally fine with everyone here in this industrial warehouse in downtown Los Angeles on this sunny winter day. It’s fine with Chamberlain’s publicist. It’s fine with the representatives from Spotify, who are hosting the Stream On …

D ave Eubank makes an exploding gesture with his fist to alert the guerrilla soldiers following him of the danger ahead. “From here until we pass the road, the trail is lined with mines,” he says, scanning the mountainous Burmese jungle for signs of trouble. “Watch where you step.” As …

T he first call for help came before sunset on the evening of July 15, 2021. “I’m throwing up blood,” Ta’Neasha Chappell, a 23-year-old mother in pretrial detention at the Jackson County Jail in Brownstown, a small town amid the hills and farms of southern Indiana, told the staff via …

A T THE EDGE of the Okavango Delta in northern Namibia, the land is so flat that I could see the top of ReconAfrica’s drill rig when we were about a mile away. ReconAfrica is a small Canadian oil-and-gas-exploration company that claimed to have discovered an oil-and-gas basin rivaling anything …

I n case there’s any doubt, Ed Sheeran is well aware of the fact that he’s … Ed Sheeran. “I’m not an idiot,” he says, early in our acquaintance. “When you say in your office, ‘I’m gonna go and interview Ed Sheeran,’ you must get sneers. I’ve always been that …

A ndrew Tate had a plan. It was late January, and he sat in a stark jail cell in a bland, four-story police structure in Bucharest, Romania. He’d been there since Dec. 29, detained on suspicion of organized crime, rape, and human trafficking. Andrew and his brother, Tristan, were escorted …

I t was one of those beautiful and unseasonably warm fall days in New York City, November 2019, when Pras Michel, founding member of the Fugees, documentary filmmaker, and man about town, was headed to a lunch date, a first date with a woman he hadn’t met before. Around noon, …

J ust before 2 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, Jan. 8, David Kessler was in his room at a hotel near Graceland when he heard a knock on his door. It was his friend Lisa Marie Presley. “Let’s go out,” she said. It was time to visit her father …