It was just a kayaking trip. Then it upended their lives.

Where words fail, there is music.

When she was a 15-year-old runaway, the writer was nearly killed by a truck driver. Twenty-seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

During the Great Floods of 2011, the Mississippi unleashed deadly currents and a flow rate that could fill the Superdome in less than a minute. Defying government orders, the author and two friends canoed 300 miles from Memphis to Vicksburg. This is their story.

People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.

On JFK and the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

On medical acting and real pain.

A trip to the Iditarod.

Can a good mother abandon her child?

Steve Jobs, age 29.

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.

Alex French and Maximillian Potter chased the story of a Hollywood pedophile ring only to have Esquire cancel it without explanation. It eventually landed at The Atlantic.

Rodrigo Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder. The unraveling of a political conspiracy.

An essay on understanding our character, worth, and limits.

A profile of the designer, who died on February 19, 2019.

On the 1998 crash of Swissair Fight 111 into the sea off a small Nova Scotia fishing village.

In 2015, my friend and I went to Disney World. Three years later, she went on a solo trip to prison.

On the grief that comes with losing livestock.

An investigation into the crash of the USS Fitzgerald.

When New Yorkers lived knee-deep in trash.

The writer on his father’s religious devotion to personal style. Among the maxims: “the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”; “there is nothing like a fresh burn”; and “always wear white to the face.”

The life of Robert Earl Hughes, who at more than 1,000 lbs. was named largest man on earth by the Guinness Book of World Records.

From Driving Miss Daisy to Green Book.

Not knowing what these movies were “about” didn’t mean it wasn’t clear what they were about. They symbolize a style of American storytelling in which the wheels of interracial friendship are greased by employment, in which prolonged exposure to the black half of the duo enhances the humanity of his white, frequently racist counterpart. All the optimism of racial progress — from desegregation to integration to equality to something like true companionship — is stipulated by terms of service.

How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.