The disappearance of the mysterious “Pakistani asset” that helped the CIA zero in on Bin Laden.

On the clip that captured a society falling apart.

A field report from Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-night bacchanal in the Las Vegas desert attended by “100,000 wasted hedonists scantily dressed in furry underwear.”

The life and last days of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

A profile of RZA, hip-hop artist and kung fu film director.

Behind the scenes of the lovely, strange world of competitive eating.

Adventures in bartending.

A profile of Jeremy Lin.

The dark art of presidential debate prep.

A torrid phone sex affair begins with a random call in a motel and ends a year later with a face-to-face meeting.

An oral history of Cheers.

An American enrolls in a Beijing ping-pong school. A series of humiliations ensue.

How the biggest club in Vegas does business.

An essay on Alcor – “the Arizona cryonics company that has put the body of Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams in cryogenic suspension, in the hope he may one day rise again” – and the desire to live forever.

How Bernardo Provenzano, “boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia” and fugitive for more than 40 years, got caught.

A profile of Merle Haggard.

The story of the Norway massacre, as told by the survivors.

The triple life of G-Rock: upscale house painter, lifelong Crip, FBI informant.

The taming of the political reporter.

How six different people live off six different, and wildly varying, incomes.

The highest-ranking CIA officer to be convicted of spying passes the tricks of the trade along to his son.

On the escape of hundreds of insurgents from Kandahar’s Sarposa Prison through a tunnel dug from the outside, and an unlikely suspect: the jail’s former warden.

“Being Justin Bieber means having an endless number of T-shirts to destroy.” A profile of the pop star just after his 18th birthday.

A cop kills a fellow officer during a drug bust and claims it was an accident. Others suspect that it wasn’t.

A married father of two tracks down his free-living doppelgänger, a musician who has avoided responsibility at every turn, to see who’s happier.