What remains of the past’s cutting edge.

A student plagiarizes a paper, and is drawn into an ongoing debate about oppression.

"Some parts of the paper I had just copied down verbatim, without really understanding, and now I was stuck with them. Now they were my opinions."

Most of what you know about women’s fertility rates is wrong.

“Jeannie Peeper’s diagnosis meant that, over her lifetime, she would essentially develop a second skeleton. Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness. The Mayo doctors didn’t tell Peeper’s parents that. All they did say was that Peeper would not live long.”

A profile of the California governor.

The discombobulated existence of polar bears and the people trying to save them.

An excerpt from Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.

How Wall Street won.

An overachiever on what he did and didn’t learn at Princeton.

William Sparkman Jr., a census worker, was found hanging from a tree in rural Kentucky. He was naked, hands bound, with the letters “FED” written across his chest. Inside the investigation into how – and why – he died.

Two B-movie directors compete for the talents of a reluctant actress.

"Real life—that's what I wanted to play, but my only roles were Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen, Werewolf Girl, Two-Headed Bride of Two-Headed Dracula, Squid Mother—all those monstrous girls that Checkers dreamed up just for me."

An explanation of enduring distaste.

A reassessment of the calm, cool JFK.

On living without memories.

The activists, politicians, and social trends that led to 2012’s gay marriage victories.

How a team of 40 engineers helped reelect Barack Obama.

On the potential existence of personalized bioweapons, which could attack a single individual without leaving a trace, and how they might be stopped.

The U.S. military’s leadership problem.

“When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers.”

On the novelist’s experience in movie-making.

Why the flood of money in this election is just the beginning.

A tale-of-the-tape breakdown of the 2012 presidential debates.

“Redistricting today has become the most insidious practice in American politics—a way, as the opportunistic machinations following the 2010 census make evident, for our elected leaders to entrench themselves in 435 impregnable garrisons from which they can maintain political power while avoiding demographic realities.”

A look inside Google’s Ground Truth.

The false promise and double standard of integration in the Obama era.

An examination of the funeral industry.