How a hit Rihanna single gets made.

A decorated Iraq war veteran with PTSD kills his brother and himself after a high-speed chase near the Grand Canyon.

A gay freshman at Rutgers, a spying roommate, and the trial that followed.

Update 3/16/12: The roommate, Dharun Ravi, has been found guilty of hate crimes.

A profile of the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker.

The unlikely story of Spanx.

What really happened between the plaintiffs in Lawrence vs. Texas, the case that ended anti-sodomy laws?

An imaginative, unpopular boy and a depressed older man face the dangers of winter.

"Something was wrong here. A person needed a coat. Even if the person was a grownup. The pond was frozen. The duck thermometer said ten. If the person was mental, all the more reason to come to his aid, as had not Jesus said, Blessed are those who help those who cannot help themselves, but are too mental, doddering, or have a disability?"

An analysis of Dr. Seuss’ literature.

Mormonism’s past and present.

A trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A profile of Ron Paul.

A profile of New York chef and fisherman David Pasternack.

A profile of Quentin Rowan, a.k.a. Q. R. Markham, ‘author’ of last fall’s short-lived spy novel hit Assassins of Secrets, which was pieced together using more than a dozen sources.

As the hip-hop group Odd Future rose to fame, their sixteen-year-old breakout star Earl Sweatshirt mysteriously disappeared.

(After a stretch at a school in Samoa, he seems to have reappeared yesterday.)

An unexplainable murder, double jeopardy, and military courts: the strange case of Tim Hennis.

A profile of Gordon Ramsay.

On the scandal of our teeming prisons.

A report from the oil boom in North Dakota, where unemployment is 3.4 percent and McDonald’s gives out $300 signing bonuses.

On YouTube’s shift towards professionally created content.

Steven Donziger, an American lawyer, headed up a successful lawsuit against Chevron on behalf of Ecuadorans. Then the legal tables turned on him.

A profile of Carrie Brownstein, riot grrrl and creator of Portlandia.

On the “horrible weirdness” of Kim Jung Il’s Korea.

A portrait of Czech President Václav Havel as he left office.

After the United States demanded the extradition of a drug lord, a bloodletting ensued.

Married sitcom writers, once famous for their love, buckle under sexual and creative differences.

"The funniest lines in their work, the lines with that satisfying crackle of sadism, were mostly his, but he was aware that it was Pam’s confidence and Pam’s higher tolerance for cliché that had won them their big contracts. And now, because she wasn’t engineered for doubt, Pam seemed to think it didn’t matter that she’d gained fifteen pounds since moving to the mountains and that she was thumping around the house with the adipose aquiver in her freckled upper arms; she certainly seemed not to care that they hadn’t had sex since before Labor Day; and she’d been pointedly deaf to certain urgent personal-grooming and postural hints that Paul had dropped during their photo shoot for L.A. Weekly."