On the mountain lions of Los Angeles.

How a struggling comedian became a pimp who eventually started sending teenage hookers on bank robbery missions that earned them notoriety as the “Starlet Bandits.”

California’s most prolific serial killer returns with little fanfare after a 13-year break.

How to photograph Los Angeles from a helicopter.

On “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez,who terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco through a string of over 30 home invasion murders starting in 1984 and ending when he was recognized and apprehended by an angry mob.

A profile of legendary L.A. crack dealer Freeway Rick Ross, now out of jail and trying to sell everything from weaves to his own biopic, written by a journalist who has known him for decades.

Los Angeles’ Wolvesmouth and the unlicensed dining industry.

“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

The triple life of G-Rock: upscale house painter, lifelong Crip, FBI informant.

The psychic benefits of leaving New York.

On a child born during the L.A. riots, and South Central a decade later.

On singer-songwriters Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks.

I get the sense that the labels' attitude toward these guys wasn't altogether different from a parent's attitude toward gifted children: Get them through the system, but make sure to give them a clean little corner to doodle in and pat them on the head when they show you what they've done, whether you understand it or not.

How a con-man convinced Los Angeles that he was prepared to purchase the Dodgers from the now-bankrupt Frank McCourt.

As the hip-hop group Odd Future rose to fame, their sixteen-year-old breakout star Earl Sweatshirt mysteriously disappeared.

(After a stretch at a school in Samoa, he seems to have reappeared yesterday.)

Years of guilt and shame over an obsession with hardcore porn drives the Orthodox Jewish-raised author to meet the personalities behind the darkest and most distrurbing X-rated subgenres and ask, “Do you ever feel guilty?”

Neither Jon nor Ian is legally married to Jaiya. Both are allowed to see other women. But the three of them live a lifestyle that—much of the time—isn't that different from a conventional marriage.

On the rise of polyandry, in which one woman settles down with two or more men.

On the LAPD’s decade-old cold case division: its detectives, its tactics, and its successes.

In 16 months, he has broken into more than a thousand homes up and down the San Fernando Valley. According to the police, his haul is worth anywhere from $16 million to $40 million. And yet because he has cultivated so many aliases, law-enforcement officials have been hard-pressed to learn his real name—Ignacio Peña Del Río—much less comprehend his unlikely background.

Rogue cops in the LAPD Rampart division’s anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) were involved in everything from drug smuggling and bank robberies to, allegedly, the murder of Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace.

On the culture of plastic surgery in Los Angeles, and how the reporter’s life changed when she got a pair of fake boobs.

A tony bedroom community in Los Angeles, a kidnapping gone horribly wrong, and the birth of a teenage fugitive.

Part one of a planned nine-part serialized biography of Harrison Gray Otis, the “inventor of modern Los Angeles.”

Future installments will include Otis’s interlude as “emperor of the Pribilofs,” his military atrocities in the Philippines, his bitter legal battles with the Theosophists, the Otis-Chandler empire in the Mexicali Valley, the Times bombing in 1910, the notorious discovery of fellatio in Long Beach, and Otis’s quixotic plan for world government.

How Frank and Jamie McCourt bought the Dodgers for “for less than the price of an oceanfront home in Southampton” and eventually became entangled in one of the most expensive divorces in California history, which laid bare their finances and confirmed what many already knew: they had bankrupted one of the most storied franchises in baseball.

In all, the McCourts reportedly took $108 million out of the team in personal distributions over five years—a sum that Molly Knight, a reporter with ESPN who has extensively covered the story, notes is eerily similar to the cash payment that she says Frank McCourt has claimed he made for the team.