When its informant’s cover was blown, German intelligence destroyed his files. Did his handlers fail to pick up a violent cell that would eventually murder nine immigrants and a cop in order to preserve their asset?

The complicated process of ghostwriting Julian Assange’s autobiography.

On goalies, and in particular, really good Finnish ones.

The murder of a rapper amid the rise of Greece’s fascist party.

An oral history project involving former IRA members becomes a prolonged court battle over a four-decade-old murder.

For centuries, a little town in Belgium has been treating the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful?

On Benjamin Murmelstein, the head of the council of elders at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

After two years of filming Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole returns to his childhood home in Ireland.

Plus: 50 years later, Gay Talese remembers the late Peter O'Toole.

The conspiracy theories surrounding the 1931 death of Hitler’s niece and object of affection.

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

On Silvio Berlusconi’s hedonism.

Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

Inside an industrial pig farm.

Rosario Crocetta is a reform-minded leader in a highly corrupt place that hates change. That’s only one of the reasons his life is in danger.

What American towns named Paris can tell us about the French.

After a botched bank robbery in 1990, Sture Bergwall, aka Thomas Quick, confessed to a string of brutal crimes. He admitted to stabbings, stranglings, incest and cannibalism. He was convicted of eight murders in all, and after the final trial he went silent for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, Bergwall came forward again—there was one more secret he had to tell.

When there are too few jobs for an entire generation.

When Germany legalized prostitution just over a decade ago, politicians hoped that it would create better conditions and more autonomy for sex workers. It hasn’t worked out that way.

The hunt for a secretive network of British men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

On the dangerous state of U.K. banks—“an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal”—and how it can be fixed.

The unique, haunting talents of a dinner-party guest have long-ranging complications and implications.

"In July, my old friends Gabe and Lila tried to crack the designer’s secret. Gabe invited the designer to one of his parties and Lila seduced him that very night. But when she had him in bed and asked how he wrote like that, he just smiled and told her, 'I listen to the party but try to focus on nothing, purely. It’s very relaxing. When I look down later, the pages are full of words.'"

A journey into the world of Italy’s racist soccer thugs.

The meaning of the Eurovision Song Contest.

In 2011, just before Christmas, a tiny Spanish town won 120 million Euros in the lottery. A trip to the new Sodeto.