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

“A quarantine facial-hair experiment led me to a deep consideration of my Blackness.”

Five hundred feet below ground with Ohio coal miners.

Here I should conjure my sister for you. Here I should describe her, so that you feel her absence as I do—so that you’re made ghostly by it, too. But, though I’m a writer, I’ve never been able to conjure her.

Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11.

In 2003, a man robbed a bank with a bomb around his neck. It exploded shortly thereafter, taking his life and leaving authorities to try to figure out who had put it there.

The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?

The writer investigates her brother’s death, their complicated relationship, and the disturbing mysteries he left behind.

Why did so many Americans receive strange packages they didn’t think they’d ordered?

On losing your Beloved in 2020.

On the retirement of Ted Williams.

A profile of a new icon.

After he killed two people in Kenosha, opportunists turned his case into a polarizing spectacle.

Gavin McInnes used to be known as a Vice magazine co-founder with controversial political leanings and an affinity for darkly unfunny jokes. Now, he’s also known as the founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys.

“It is a beautiful hand: strong, with long, slender fingers and smooth skin, its nails ridgeless and pink. If you didn’t know Jonathan Koch—if you first met him, say, on the courts at the Calabasas Tennis & Swim Club—you might not suspect that his hand previously belonged to someone else.”

At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.

The inside story of a cartel’s deadly assault on a Mexican town near the Texas border—and the U.S. drug operation that sparked it.

In October 2006, a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, New York’s schools remain separate and unequal.

What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.

Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of her gravely ill child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.

Looking back on the George Floyd rebellion.

Armed only with their psychotic courage, they were running, dancing, singing, smashing, burning, screaming, storming heaven: all rapturous varieties of Baraka’s “magic actions.” I listened to 19-year-olds talk nonstop throughout the night we spent in jail, as they howled insults at the officers and swapped stories of humiliation by police. It struck me that they were too young to have seen even the initial phase of BLM. Though well-acquainted with power and violence, they were tasting “politics” for the first time. Whatever the fate of the movement, I suspect that much of their future thinking will be measured against the feelings that filled the nights of 2020: the vastness and immediacy, the blur and brutal clarity.

The soul of an octopus.

For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo.

A fugitive from the US started fresh on Vancouver Island—then bilked new victims out of millions of dollars while law enforcement refused to act.