One follower of the rabbi said in an interview that Mr. Grimm pressed him for $20,000. The follower said Mr. Grimm instructed him to meet him “near the F.B.I. building,” in Lower Manhattan, in summer 2010 to give the money. The follower said he handed over $5,000 in cash in an envelope to Mr. Grimm in Mr. Grimm’s car.

Within a week, the follower said, he gave Mr. Grimm a $5,000 check from a friend. Mr. Grimm then repeatedly called the follower and demanded another $10,000, the follower said.

“Every day, he used to call me, over and over,” the follower said.

The follower said he ignored the calls and did not give again.

A second follower recalled that Mr. Grimm came to his office in Manhattan to solicit a legal contribution. As he was handing over the check, the second follower said, Mr. Grimm confided in him that there were ways of working around the campaign rules.

The story is well-reported (and includes a strange link to Lebron James), and worth reading in full. But the part that rang most familiar to me was Grimm’s response:

“Any suggestion that I was involved in any activities that may run afoul of the campaign finance laws is categorically false and belied by my life of public service protecting and enforcing the laws of this country,” Mr. Grimm said in the statement on Friday.

In 2011, I reported on Grimm’s career “enforcing the laws of this country,” including allegations—substantiated by witnesses including a former N.Y.P.D. officer, but denied by Grimm—that Grimm had misused his authority at a nightclub. My story was largely about Grimm’s work with a dubious F.B.I. informant and con-man known as Josef von Habsburg. When I tried to question Grimm on both matters in his Washington office, he ended our interview by saying, “you don’t rate to come here and question me.” He declined to provide myself or the New Yorker’s fact-checking department any evidence to support his denials. When the story came out, he claimed the article was a Democratic Party plot.

In light of the most recent allegations against Grimm, I’m reposting my New Yorker piece.

But I’ve done other things, of arguably lesser import but requiring greater effort. Most time consumingly: In January, I repurposed my old URL for this very site in the service of a new digital longform journalism venture, The Atavist. It turned out that some people liked the thing, and we decided to keep on doing it. I also wrote a story for The Atavist, the true story of a strange and elaborate cash heist in Stockholm.

Meanwhile, a couple of my ridiculously long-term efforts finally landed in actual, old-fashioned print pages. In February, National Geographic published a story about animal domestication that I’d been at for two years, and for which I traveled to Siberia to check out one of the world’s most intriguing scientific experiments: the fox-farm domestication project. A couple months later I finished up an 14-month-in-the-making, 9,000-word story for The New Yorker about the FBI, confidential informants, a pretend prince, and a Congressman. It came out in May (and is not yet online except for subscribers). The story was based on thousands of pages of documents and over 100 interviews. The Congressman didn’t care for it. But his critiques were a bit off. We also published a kind of alternate ending, far more mysterious than the print version, online.

And now we’re up to date. I’d apologizing for not posting more, in the tradition of such posts, but I never posted much so it wouldn’t seem sincere.

But here’s one statement that I unequivocally agree with, from Gladwell’s live chat today:

[Comment From from indiafrom india:] Angus Johnston in the Huff. Post says you don’t understand social networks. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angus-johnston/what-malcolm-gladwell-doe_b_741916.html If you had a chance to read the article, what is your take on his perspective?

Malcolm Gladwell: I think what he means is that I don’t agree with him. Incomprehension is simply what a narcissist calls disagreement.

This style of argument — such and such just doesn’t get Twitter, or the Web, or Facebook — is epidemic in online discussion, particularly as it pertains to social media. I hate to break it to all of the new media experts out there, but these things are not actually difficult to comprehend. And arguing that Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t understand the terms of the debate, rather than that he takes a particular stance that you disagree with, is the kind of haughty dismissal that just makes you sound defensive.

But wait…

Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. [emphasis added]

Damn. Well, nevermind.

After some months of neglect, this weed-filled patch of Web real estate is about to undergo a significant overhaul. There are a lot of ins and outs to these changes, a lot of what-have-yous, but the gist is this:

• Later this summer, a new publication will be taking up residence at The Atavist. It will bring you original long-form journalism, written by a variety of fine authors. More details on this will be forthcoming soon.

• Meanwhile, this blog and the other bits and links related to me, Evan Ratliff — who can utilize the third person with impunity now that he has done it dozens of times in print — will continue to be archived at the site for a while, just not on the front page.

• The Evan Ratliff-related content on the site has also moved permanently to a new home: www.cazart.net. You will find that it looks very much the same, only there instead of here (if you are already there, this may not make as much sense). The email you find to your right will, with any luck, all remain operable.

I hope you’ll find yourself returning to check out the new Atavist before too long.

Those looking for yet still more info can find some of the hunters stories in their own words, photos of my disguise changes from day to day, and the behind-the-scenes of Wired’s challenges and clues.

Sometime next week, we’ll also set up a live chat of some sort to answer any remaining questions that anybody has. We’ll put out word on the Twitter #vanish stream, of course, with details.

Then, this Saturday, on Weekend All Things Considered, in a piece by reporter Alex Cohen. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the piece.]

I’ll post clips if and when I get my hands on them. In the meantime, here’s a recap of some of the other stories about the whole thing, from during and after:

When the contest was launched, a number of hacker sites, reality game-related blogs, and other online forums and bloggers wrote it up, including Grant Hamilton, who made an interesting meta-media comparison to the find-that-guy promotions used by newspapers in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Slashdot noticed it, resulting in a fascinating and occasionally funny stream of comments.

Online news services started picking it up. CNET reported on the suspension of my Twitter account, which was eventually lifted after some typically poor Twitter customer service. ABCNews.com dove in with a long piece. Discover compared it to a real live “Where’s Waldo.” A Seattle Times columnist noted my living it up on $17 drinks at the Viceroy in L.A. Kottke.org called it “the case of the missing Wired writer.”

As the hunt started picking up, my editor Nick Thompson appeared on NPR’s national show “On the Media,” as well as local programs in around the country. One of the hunters interviewed Nick and Teeuwynn Woodruff from Lone Shark Games for a podcast, digging for clues.

Meanwhile, while in L.A. I snuck my way into a series of man-on-the-street interviews about swine flu with Amanda Congdon for SometimesDaily.com. She followed up with another video, and then posted some raw footage of the encounter.

As we headed toward the dramatic conclusion, KSL5 TV in Salt Lake City told people to watch out for me at the U.S. soccer game. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. mused about getting away in the modern age.

After I got caught in New Orleans, ABCNews.com followed up with a recap, as did NPR’s “On The Media.” CBSNews.com talked to Jeff Reifman, my nemesis, to find out how he did it. Nick and I appeared on CNN.com Live, me with my head newly shorn. Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times Picayune covered the New Orleans angle. Slashdot revisited the whole thing, and the commenters took a few more good shots. I got a little shout out from my celiac compatriots for bringing attention to the condition.

Reifman told his side of the capture at NewsCloud, and then rounded up the contest’s media appearances, which I am now further rounding up.

But left out of all of this, of course, was what the hell I was up to that whole time. For that story, you’ll have to check out the December Wired…

I’ll be describing those 25 days in great detail in the December issue. There were almost daily surprises, both in what I found myself doing, and what I saw (and, of course, failed to see) the “hunters” doing to find me.

But for now I wanted to offer an extended thanks. First, to my friends and family, some of whom were made unwitting participants in this privacy-obliterating endeavor, and all of whom—especially my wonderful girlfriend (whose name the dedicated hunters know already)—were incredibly understanding and played along. Also to Nick Thompson, who sacrificed an insane amount of hours from other work and from promoting his own book (“The Hawk and The Dove,” which is getting a fantastic response, and which everyone should check out), to serve as the lead investigator. Without Nick, the whole thing would have failed in a multitude of ways. As well everyone at Wired and Lone Shark Games (particularly Teeuwyn Woodruff and Mike Selinker), both for enabling it and putting in many of their own hours. And finally to all the folks who hunted me—and aided me—for contributing their obsession and ingenuity, and especially for (with a few pretty harmless exceptions) honoring the rules about harassing my family. Many have emailed—and I want to hear from anyone who followed it: eratliff@atavist.net—to let me know they were glad I was caught. I don’t blame them. And although I was disappointed, I’m pretty pleased that at least it was by a clever bunch like Jeff Reifman and the guys at Naked Pizza.

I’d also like to offer an apology, to people I encountered along the way and deceived about my identity. It was one of the worst parts of the whole experience. I’ve been contacting them individually to explain whenever possible (a strange journalistic endeavor, that), and they’ve so far been gracious and forgiving, taking the whole thing in the spirit of fun it was intended. But many I won’t be able to find, and to them I am sorry. I won’t write about anyone by name who hasn’t given me explicit approval to do so.

To critics who griped that it wasn’t “real” enough; that it was either too easy to find me or (as people argued right up until I was caught) too difficult; that a “true” man-on-the-run would or wouldn’t have done this or that; I can only say: You nailed it! I wasn’t, in fact, a “real” fugitive. Very well observed, and I fully support your conviction that you would have done it better. But in our case, we were trying to remain, as much as possible, both authentic and engaging, two goals that were often in conflict. In compressing my time on the lam into 30 days, with the general public as the investigators, we didn’t exactly have a model to follow. You may also find that many of the things people found most “unreal,” like me using my ATM and credit cards at times, were not at all what they seemed.

Finally, to accusations of carrying out a “stunt,” I plead guilty to all but the pejorative assumption—given that category would include the journalistic “stunts” behind “Hell’s Angels,” “The Paper Lion” (and other Plimpton adventures), “Into Thin Air,” and “Nickled and Dimed,” among other pieces of narrative nonfiction that I greatly admire. We attempted what we thought was a unique, albeit self-indulgent and inevitably flawed, reporting venture. We’re hoping readers will find the results as fascinating as we did. But you can check out the December article and decide for yourselves.

The trouble with stories of people caught faking deaths, or just lighting out on the run, however, is that in hindsight they always seem to fall victim to a singular dumb error. (Or, in the case of plane-jumper Marcus Shrenker, probably the recent fake-death attempt people are most familiar with, a tidy collection of dumb errors). “If I had just…” is the refrain of the caught fugitive, while stories of successful lives on the lam — for obvious reasons — never get told. Even the Matthew Alan Sheppards of the world can’t tell us what I think we really want to know: so how hard is it really, to disappear?

So I decided to try it.

For part two of the story, I’m going on the lam for 30 days. The magazine has put a $5000 bounty on my head for anyone who finds me.  The contest has a variety of rules, for both me and my presumptive pursuers, to try and make it a reasonable simulation of a real life on the run. The most important of which, for me, is this incentive: if I am found before September 15, most of that $5k comes out of my story fee.

You can find the details, and follow or participate in the speculation, at www.wired.com/vanish. They’ll have any info on my bank account usage, cell phone, email, and the like, along with disturbingly large professional photos of me taken from every angle (which are also in the magazine). The man running that site, my editor Nick Thompson, wants me found, and he doesn’t have a clue where I’m going. So anything that comes from him is trustworthy. Anything that purports to come from me, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

I’m not dropping out, though, heading for a cabin or living in a cave. So security permitting, I’ll be posting more thoughts and leftovers from the first piece here over the month — or however long I make it. But if you are reading this, it means I’m already gone.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I daresay it’s the most exciting mass spectrometry protein detection story you’ll read this month….and maybe even all year. But it’s also about dinosaurs! And more than that, about how science operates and scientific disputes — even entertainingly acrimonious ones — get resolved.

For anyone who has already read it, here’s a response from U. Maryland professor Steven Salzberg–whom I interviewed for the piece–on the story and the latest T. Rex research.