The 1826 kidnapping – and murder – that begat America’s obsession with Masons.

An essay on its history and future during a time when “gayness, we are told, is over.”

Two brothers divided by Central African Republic’s civil war.

President Lincoln worked very hard all his life. After he died, his corpse kept a gruelling travel schedule, too.

Merriam-Webster is revising its most authoritative tome for the digital age. But in an era of twerking and trolling, what should a dictionary look like?

How the new store is—and isn’t—changing Detroit.

The story of an American myth.

On former CIA agent John T. Downey, who spent more than 20 years in China as the longest held American captive of war.

The author examines his terrible football career.

Bryan Goldberg’s site for women was widely mocked when it launched a year ago. Today it has 15 million readers per month and some of its harshest early critics are on the payroll.

An excerpt from Murakami's forthcoming novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.</a>

An excerpt from Murakami's forthcoming novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

“I have a kind of weird story related to death. Something my father told me. He said it was an actual experience he had when he was in his early twenties. Just the age I am now. I’ve heard the story so many times I can remember every detail. It’s a really strange story—it’s hard even now for me to believe it actually happened—but my father isn’t the type to lie about something like that. Or the type who would concoct such a story. I’m sure you know this, but when you make up a story the details change each time you retell it. You tend to embellish things, and forget what you said before. ... But my father’s story, from start to finish, was always exactly the same, each time he told it. So I think it must be something he actually experienced. I’m his son, and I know him really well, so the only thing I can do is believe what he said. But you don’t know my father, Tsukuru, so feel free to believe it or not. Just understand that this is what he told me. You can take it as folklore, or a tale of the supernatural, I don’t mind. It’s a long story, and it’s already late, but do you mind if I tell it?”

One woman’s ghastly dollhouse dioramas turned crime scene investigation into a science.

How a bipolar diagnosis follows you from the top to the bottom of professional basketball.

The railroad foreman’s brain was pierced by a tamping iron. He lived to tell the tale.

Why 18th-century French police obsessively tracked elite sex workers.

In 1995, Ramirez allegedly raped Patricia Esparza. He was tortured and killed weeks later. Now she’s charged with his murder. Is she responsible?

Ronald Reagan made Linda Taylor a notorious American villain. Her other sins were far worse.

The tale of the only art exhibit in space.

In 2008, Hana Williams left an Ethiopian orphanage to join a large, Christian fundamentalist family in America. Three years later she was dead.

How the corpses of Hitler’s victims still haunt modern science—and American abortion politics.

On the film The Act of Killing, in which the actual perpetrators of a 1966-1966 Indonesian genocide recreate their own actions for the camera, and what it can tell us about our memories of the Vietnam War.

The story of Melissa Barthelemy, a prostitute killed in a string of murders on Long Island in December 2010.

Life in Green Bank, West Virginia, a town without cell signals and a haven people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (a disease that may or may not exist).