The Audio Long Read

Best of 2023: The widow and the murderer: a friendship born of tragedy

Best of 2023: The widow and the murderer: a friendship born of tragedy

Best of 2023: No coach, no agent, no ego: the incredible story of the ‘Lionel Messi of cliff diving’

Best of 2023: The strange survival of Guinness World Records

Best of 2023: Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site

Best of 2023: Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote

Best of 2023: Dark waters: how the adventure of a lifetime turned to tragedy

Nitrogen wars: the Dutch farmers’ revolt that turned a nation upside-down

From the archive: The rise and fall of French cuisine

‘I remember the silence between the falling shells’: the terror of living under siege as a child

A violent murder, a child on death row

From the archive: ‘We the people’: the battle to define populism

From the archive: Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more?

A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot

Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?

From the archive: ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back

The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age

From the archive: Do we need a new theory of evolution?

Walking into disaster: the narcotrafficking scandal that blew up the BVI

Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

From the archive: the free speech panic: how the right concocted a crisis

‘We hate it. It’s desecration’: the real cost of HS2

Death on the inside: as a prison officer, I saw how the system perpetuates violence

From the archive: The King of Kowloon: my search for the cult graffiti prophet of Hong Kong

We published explosive stories about the president of El Salvador. Now we can’t go home

‘We were forced to burn bodies’: will survivors of the Tadamon massacres see justice?

From the archive: The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis

‘The English person with a Chinese stomach’: how Fuchsia Dunlop became a Sichuan food hero

The dangerous rise of Buddhist extremism: ‘Attaining nirvana can wait’

From the archive: Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a religion

Hard to digest: we still live in Fast Food Nation

‘I wish I could say I kept my cool’: my maddening experience with the NHS wheelchair service

From the archive: The cartel, the journalist and the gangland killings that rocked the Netherlands

Inside the rise and fall of Podemos: ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’

Best of 2025: ‘A relentless, destructive energy’: inside the trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon

Best of 2025: ‘What reconciliation? What forgiveness?’: Syria’s deadly reckoning

Best of 2025: The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job

Best of 2025: Life in a ‘sinking nation’: Tuvalu’s dreams of dry land

Best of 2025: The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image

Best of 2025: Don’t call it morning sickness: ‘At times in my pregnancy I wondered if this was death coming for me’

The snail farm don: is this the most brazen tax avoidance scheme of all time?

The Birth Keepers: I choose this – episode one

‘DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines’: my mother’s worrying reliance on AI for health advice

From the archive: is the IMF fit for purpose?

‘The police weren’t interested’: what’s driving the rise in private prosecutions?

When I met Craig he was 13 and homeless. I still thought his life might turn around. I was tragically wrong

Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia

From the archive: A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world

‘They take the money and go’: why not everyone is mourning the end of USAID

‘I knew in my head we were dying’: the last voyage of the Scandies Rose