Long Reads

New York midwife Elizabeth Catlin faces 95 individual felony counts at her upcoming trial. For what? For doing her job. Politics and patriarchy make the work of many credentialed, experienced midwives illegal — to the detriment of women and underserved communities.

Imagine yourself as a modern-day alligator in central Florida, where 12 acres of wild land is sacrificed to development every hour. This is a story about what happens when the South’s creatures no longer have room to move — and about a project aimed at preserving the few corridors that connect what remains of the wild land.

The fight over preserving public land during the Trump era is taking a strange, angry twist in Montana’s Crazy Mountains. Both sides are armed.

First he changed the sound of popular music. Then he revolutionized fashion and sneakers. Now, Kanye West is redesigning the very building blocks of family life—food, clothing, and shelter—and he’s claimed thousands of acres in Wyoming as a test site for his ideas.

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorize. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.

Oxygen and iron are essential for the production of energy, but may also conspire to destroy the delicate order of our cells. Elevated iron is at the center of a web of disease stretching from cancer to diabetes.

The ‘wolf pack’ case inspired widespread anger and protests against sexual assault laws in Spain. The case had been a moment of reckoning, which laid bare a deep culture of misogyny in Spanish society. But the anti-feminist backlash that followed has helped propel the far-right to its biggest gains since Franco.

The United States has been a laboratory for experiments in alternative living since its founding. As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.

Scammers exploit cognitive errors, like “optimism bias.” Most people think they’re a little bit charmed, a little luckier than average. We harbour a personal fable that things are likely to go well for us.

For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?

Doomsday luxury accommodation is a booming business, offering customers a chance to sit out global pandemics and nuclear wars in comfort – as long as they have the money to pay for it.

After police failed to solve his son’s murder, Francisco Holgado infiltrated the local criminal underworld in pursuit of those responsible. He became a national hero – but at what cost?

The restaurant industry is in a scary place, one that fairly guarantees heartbreak. We’re eating at street-corner stalls and food trucks, in front of the TV and at the grocery—everywhere but restaurants. They might not be here when we get back.

My French grandmother came to the US to escape the Nazis. Although she had made a life for herself in America, she never stopped seeming sad to me, and her sadness never stopped unnerving me. What did a box of letters and photographs reveal about the sacrifice she made?

Native Hawaiians are protecting the mountain of Maunakea, at the heart of Hawaii’s Big Island, from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at its summit, where the facility would join venerable observatories like the twin Keck domes and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility.

The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully.

Victoria’s Secret defined femininity for millions of women. But inside the company, two powerful men presided over an entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment, according to interviews with more than 30 current and former executives, employees, contractors and models, as well as court filings and other documents.

It was the spring of 1992 in the small town of Martensville. Rumours were spreading that a local family were members of a secret satanic cult, abusing children at their home daycare and at a property outside of town. A horde of devil worshippers was allegedly on its way, looking to attack in the dead of night.

Progress is dynamic, self-generating, unpredictable. Poverty is static, effectively resourceless, subject to interests that are not its own, therefore valuable to those interests. 

One day, Michael Shattuck started to run. He liked it, so he ran longer, sometimes for as many as 65 hours each week. He never wanted to stop. What was he running from?

June 26, 2017: Another man vanishes from the Gay Village. Part one in a four-part series on the Toronto police investigation and community efforts that caught serial killer Bruce McArthur.

The incentive to be a proficient forger has soared; a single, expertly executed old master knockoff can finance a long, comfortable retirement. The technologies available to abet the aspiring forger have also improved. Forgeries have got so good – and so costly – that Sotheby’s has brought in its own in-house fraud-busting expert.

After decades of shielding the identities of accused child abusers from the public, many Catholic leaders are now releasing lists of their names. But the lists are inconsistent, incomplete and omit key details.

Derek Murphy investigates runners whose times seem suspicious, which is what brought him to a 70-year-old doctor named Frank Meza. He’d run an exceptional time of 2 hours, 53 minutes that day, setting a record for the fastest marathon ever run by a man his age.