How memories go wrong.

On gender-variant kids, and their parents.

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?

Greg Ousley killed his parents and has been locked up for nineteen years.

Is that enough?

Inside a small town revived by an influx of immigrants and then destroyed by a Homeland Security raid.

The murderous tale of Washington D.C. fabulist Albrecht Muth and his late wife Viola Drath.

Life as a police informant.

On caring for a bipolar parent amidst a broken mental health care system.

How a Mexican drug cartel makes its billions.

On Jenny Craig’s European expansion and how dieting differs in France and the States.

The Horace Mann School’s secret history of sexual abuse.

A profile of filmmaker Michael Haneke.

Ostensibly straight black men who have sex with other men.

Ina May Gaskin and the battle for at-home births.

On the final two holdouts in Treece, Kansas, a former mining town that is soon to be wiped off the maps.

New research on children’s behavior.

The idea that a young child could have psychopathic tendencies remains controversial among psychologists. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, has argued that psychopathy, like other personality disorders, is almost impossible to diagnose accurately in children, or even in teenagers — both because their brains are still developing and because normal behavior at these ages can be misinterpreted as psychopathic.

Romney’s former Bain partner makes a case for inequality.

How Craig Venter’s bugs might save the world.

A profile of the hardworking Samuel L. Jackson, whose movies have grossed more than any actor’s ever.

Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law was passed to protect kids from meth labs. But is the prosecution of about 60 mothers – and the definition of “child” extended to “unborn child” – pushing its boundaries too far?

“That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy.”

On the possibility of “fluid intelligence.”

The real-life events that inspired the new Richard Linklater dark comedy Bernie:

It’s a story about people believing what they want to believe, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. It’s a story about people not being what they seem. And it’s a story, as the movie poster says, “so unbelievable it must be true.” Which it is. I know this because the widow in the freezer was, in real life, my Aunt Marge, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, my mother’s sister and, depending on whom you ask, the meanest woman in East Texas. She was 81 when she was murdered, and Bernie Tiede, her constant companion and rumored paramour, was 38. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2027, when he’ll be 69.