The mob and Youngstown, Ohio: a love story.

Marion Barry is running for reelection — and nobody cares.

On the science of parking spaces.

After decades of failed revitalization strategies, a town of 10,000 tries another.

On the American Legislative Exchange Council, a D.C. nonprofit with a library of more than 800 pieces of fill-in-the-blank legislation ready for state legislatures across the country.

A charismatic entrepreneur, an ex-con turned devout Christian, and the politicians who championed them.

The story of a $36 billion Ponzi scheme in Minnesota.

On the politics of North Carolina.

From Vallejo to San Jose, a tour of local government despair:

The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis.

More Lewis: the complete financial disaster tourism series to date.

It’s 11 p.m. when Larson at last agrees to meet me in the lobby of the Hampton Inn, next door to the Gurnee Grand. He’s just come out of a marathon closed-door meeting with his fellow exiled senators. Tall, gap-toothed, and handsome, but with a squished, broad nose, Larson appears in a fitted black overcoat, a sedate suit with a Wisconsin flag lapel pin, and an athletic backpack. He looks shockingly young, younger than his thirty years, and seems to be relieved that I am even a few years younger myself.

We jump in my Chevy and head for the town’s late-night diner: Denny’s. By the time we settle into a booth, Larson has dropped the routine political affectations—the measured language, the approved talking points, the inauthentic humor. We’re cracking up comparing Republicans to evildoers on South Park and shit-talking mutual acquaintances in Milwaukee.

And then, just as Larson is about to take a bite of his veggie burger, I ask the freshman senator if he is scared.

“What would I be scared about?” he replies.

The first profile of Michele Bachmann.

A four-part investigation of brothers William and James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. One was president of the Massachusetts Senate for 17 years. The other was on the lam for 16 before being captured Wednesday in Santa Monica.

This new strain of Republican is not one Wisconsin, nor the United States, has ever seen…The new Republicans are corporate wrecking crews, given a sledgehammer, a piece of legislation and a command to “make it fit.”