Tag Archives: longreads

F or a private detective working in Los Angeles, most investigations tend to follow a predictable pattern. You get a divorce case, or a custody case, and from the time the client pays the retainer, you know what the job will entail. You’ll follow a guy around taking pictures from …

B yron Walker knew he was in trouble. He’d been late for the Riverside Church Hawks team van departing Upper Manhattan for a tournament in Massachusetts one spring morning in 1977. When the Riverside squad — part of the top teenage-basketball travel program in the country — arrived for its …

I n January 2020, just weeks before the NBA shut down and Costco shelves emptied and Tom Hanks got sick, Joy Corbitt’s only brother died in his mid-forties with symptoms of Covid. Which meant, from the pandemic’s earliest days, Joy was taking no chances. She’d heard that Black and brown …

F or Andrew Douglas, bottom was seven cops banging on the door of his apartment. He’d sharpened the knife “good,” filled the bathtub with water, and downed a vial of Coumadin to bleed out faster. Had his dad not sensed something and dialed 911, Andrew, a star baseball player turned …

T he year was 2000. Y2K came and went, and a group of four childhood best friends had something more important to worry about now: middle school. Would boys like them? Would they be popular? Would they stick together? That summer, they found a way to briefly escape the future. …

I t was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising …

After a popular YouTuber who entraps suspected sexual predators he contacts through Roblox was banned from the youth-targeted gaming platform this month, the company found itself defending its approach to moderation and user safety. But the furor over harm to minors hasn’t been limited to the game’s community. Now a …

O n the arctic evening of Feb. 13, Yessenia Ruano and her husband, Miguel, stand in their Milwaukee living room turning over a question they’ve been avoiding for weeks: whether tomorrow will be the day Ruano, 37, says goodbye to their two nine-year-old twin daughters, without knowing when she’ll see …

In the video, a man putters up and down the street carrying a pitchfork, shouting at his neighbors and at no one, punctuated by the occasional obscenity. He isn’t happy that the neighbors are filming. “You guys are taping me? For what?” he asks. “I’m walking down the street! I’m …

I ’ve been dreaming about the Badlands again. It’s a scorching July day in 2002, and Nicole and I are hauling ass in my VW Beetle across South Dakota. I’m driving; she’s riding shotgun, eating a Slim Jim. We’re blasting The Eminem Show with the windows down, our hair whipping …