The dilemma of the prison nursery.

The story behind a wad of cotton and a bit of string.

The events leading up to the botched execution of Clayton Lockett.

A faked marriage between undercover agents leads to the arrest of a dozen drug dealers.

Inside the abusive practices of magazine-subscription sub-contractors.

Investigating a pilot’s choice and the death of 217 people.

Researchers do look into near-death experiences, seeking a verified case of what they call “apparently non-physical veridical perception.”

A correspondence school for writers turns out to be a sham. This piece forced it into bankruptcy.

For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.

The United States fights wars it can’t win using soldiers it doesn’t know.

Nearly 50 years ago, a penniless monk arrived in Manhattan, where he began to build an unrivaled community of followers—and a reputation for sexual abuse.

Ozel Clifford Brazil was a respected clergyman who helped thousands of African-American teens go to college. He broke the law to do it.

The rise of anonymous group suicide in Japan.

Rejecting the “American immortal” mentality.

Maintaining order behind bars.

Posing for family survival in a society that values boys over girls.

On the universal drive to grow and reproduce.

On learning a new language, a new culture, and why “it must never be concluded that an urge toward the cosmopolitan, toward true education, will make people stop hitting you.”

When Kenneth Jarecke photographed the charred remains of an Iraqi soldier during the Gulf War, he thought it might help challenge the popular narrative of a clean, uncomplicated battle. He was wrong.

A profile of Afghanistan’s outgoing president.

“We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.”

The first living ex-pope in 600 years watches as the successor he enabled dismantles his legacy.

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, on crying in movie theaters, “attention whores” and David Foster Wallace.

Migrant workers in California and the consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy.

What Rüdiger Heim learned about his father.

Excerpted from The Eternal Nazi.</p>