Can real activism happen on Twitter and Facebook? Malcolm Gladwell says no.

Google’s founders and CEO as they moved from the search business into… everything.

A 2006 profile of Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook opened from a college-only site to a public social network.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, on the eve of the release of The Social Network, believed to be a deeply unflattering portrait of him and the genesis of his company.

David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

Inside the C Street house in Washington and the little-known spiritual group behind it.

David Chang’s manic quest for a flawless restaurant.

The billionaire Koch brothers have declared war on Obama.

A profile of Francis Collins, a fervent Christian, former head of the Human Genome Project and Obama’s appointee to head N.I.H., now at the center of the stem cell research debate.

When Bob Dylan met Allen Ginsberg; a chapter from Sean Wilentz’s forthcoming Bob Dylan in America.

A firsthand account of prison’s dysfunctional relationships. The writer wasn’t able to gain access through official channels, so he completed guard training and took a job as a Sing Sing corrections officer.

After two New Jersey homes were robbed of their silver—only their silver—in the same night, the local police got a call from a detective in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I know the guy who’s doing your burglaries.”

A year after dozens died protesting his election and hundreds more were imprisoned, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad grants a rare interview to an American journalist.

In “Operation Mincemeat” a vagrant’s corpse, raided from a London morgue, washed up on a beach in Spain, setting in motion an elaborate piece of espionage that fooled Nazi intelligence. Or did it?

Why the U.S. Senate gets so little done.

David Sedaris on smoking and quitting.

Should modern medicine shift its end-of-life priorities, focusing less on staving off death and more on improving a patient’s last days?

Is there really such a thing as brain death?

The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the 101st Airborne Division, an execution of captured Iraqi prisoners, and how far up the chain of command responsibility lies.

How Christopher Hitchens, a former socialist, became one of the most vigorous defenders of the war in Iraq.

The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art.

War stories from the world of Manhattan real estate, written during an era when everybody knew the Internet would completely change the business and nobody quite knew how.

Saad Mohseni, Afghanistan’s first media mogul and a business partner of Rupert Murdoch, produces everything from nightly news broadcasts to the controversial Afghan version of American Idol.

Is Mike Huckabee the GOP’s best hope in 2012? Mike Huckabee’s not so sure.

The boom in dystopian fiction aimed at young adults.