A marriage devoted to the mind-body problem.

Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?

Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?

A lifetime of restless isolation explained.

The People’s Republic learns to drive.

A postmodern murder mystery.

How the Mississippi lawyer who brought down Big Tobacco overstepped.

Learning how to go the distance.

A multibillionaire’s relentless quest for global influence.

A nonconformist rapper’s second act.

The far-flung adventures of a tugboating family.

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

Anatomy of a murder trial.

She was brilliant. Was she also a fraud?

My life as Keith Moon.

What separates the women from the men.

Rin Tin Tin and the making of Warner Bros.

How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.

On the front lines of a burgeoning civil war.

Day by day, a city at war with the regime collects its dead.

A new group of breeders want to undomesticate the cat.

They thought that they’d found the perfect apartment. They weren’t alone.

The traumatized veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Africans who risk all to reach Europe look to an exiled priest as their savior.

Does the alternatives-to-incarceration industry profit from injustice?

Along for the ride with a boatload of refugees risking their lives.

The haunted past of Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama neurobiologist who shot six colleagues during a staff meeting.

Heartbreak at the edge of the earth.

“Oh, my God. This is going to be a huge one.”

“Shark Week” • “Difficult Women” • “Private Practice”

“Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It’s a surprise, to us all. The Embassy of Cambodia!”

Why medical bills are killing us. [sub req’d]

A profile of Jordan at 50.

Eleven months after Sandy Hook, Newtown’s mourning remains incalculable, especially that of the parents who lost their children. And the influx of sympathy—and money—has sometimes made the grieving more difficult rather than less.

Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie.

The haunted past of Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama neurobiologist who shot six colleagues during a staff meeting.

His brain and body shattered in a horrible accident as a young boy, Bret Dunlap thought just being able to hold down a job, keep an apartment, and survive on his own added up to a good enough life. Then he discovered running.

A year ago, Newtown was getting ready for Christmas. Priest, principal, police officer, bagel-shop owner—all were caught up in the bustle, planning everything from holiday concerts to D.U.I. checkpoints. On the anniversary of the school shooting in Connecticut that left 20 first-graders and six adults murdered, one way to grasp the full tragedy of this all-American town is by tracing the ordinary day that led up to it.

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse.

A pair of undercover journalists, a boatload of refugees, 200 miles of ocean and a journey that has claimed more than a thousand lives.

Day by day, a city at war with the regime collects its dead. [subscription required]

The Granite Mountain Hotshots, an outfit of professional wildland firefighters, had 20 members. On June 30, 19 of them lost their lives.

The multiple lives of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

At the Houston Police Department, a lax discipline system keeps negligent cops on the streets.

The story of a ship’s final voyage. [subscription required]

Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his own show.

It’s something we’ve all been meaning to do. The father-son bonding adventure. You know: The big fishing excursion, The road trip down Route 66. Last year, Wells Tower took a completely different approach with his dad: Burning Man, the world’s largest chemically enhanced self-expression festival. They went to witness the Slut Olympics. They went to see the art. They went to discover what draws 60,000 people to one of the least hospitable places on Earth. Then they set up camp and took off their clothes. And things got truly interesting.

Adventure and heartbreak at the edge of the earth.

Confronting the trauma of sexual abuse. [subscription required]

Uncovering my FBI file. [subscription required]

Doug Aitken’s tech-fueled, all-night, glow-in-the-dark, cross-country, pop-art train ride.

In a remote corner of the South China Sea, 105 nautical miles from the Philippines, lies a submerged reef the Filipinos call Ayungin.

“Oh, my God. This is going to be a huge one.”

How a group of hippie surfers and a former Spanish teacher built the largest weed-smuggling empire on the West Coast.

Deep anxiety about the ability to have children later in life plagues many women. But the decline in fertility over the course of a woman’s 30s has been oversold. Here’s what the statistics really tell us—and what they don’t.

The inside story of long-term criminal fraud at Ranbaxy, the Indian drug company that makes generic Lipitor for millions of Americans.

On the slaughter of songbirds migrating across the Mediterranean.

The use and abuse of civil forfeiture.

Why medical bills are killing us. [subscription required]

West was just a place where people pulled off the highway to buy kolaches. Then it exploded.

She was 52, homeless, and cancer-stricken. A group of devoted strangers vowed that she would not die alone. And then something miraculous happened. One woman’s beautiful, strange, and troubling final days.

Fifty rapes. Ten murders. Two identities. One man. From 1976 to 1986, one of the most violent serial criminals in American history terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and might still be out there. Now a determined investigator, a retired detective, and a group of online obsessives are on the hunt to track him down.

Chasing the boom in South Texas.

[sub req’d] Walter Keller had nearly lost his battle with leukemia when he went to Penn’s Carl June and his group of researchers for a radical new cancer treatment. What happened next may change medicine forever.

Who is Amelia Earhart?

Out of prison and on the move, the legendary crack dealer is seeking his fortune yet again. A journalist picks up the trail of the man who has captivated and confounded him for decades.

And as President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard Fisher helps make the money go round. Meet the Fed’s most unlikely central banker.

He’s hilarious, hugely influential, and beloved by his many powerful friends. But Jeffrey Goldberg’s hotheaded attempts to referee the infighting over Israel make him perhaps the most polarizing journalist in town. Who died and made him Moses?

[sub req’d] From the time of his arrest three years ago, the charges against Kermit Gosnell were almost too grisly to digest. But was he a madman, or something else? Here, Steve Volk unravels the decades-long saga of the notorious abortion doctor—and the war he believed he was waging.

Only 132 of Chicago’s 507 murders were solved last year. Why is the Chicago Police Department struggling to bring so many killers to justice?

A St. Louis entrepreneur’s brilliant idea won instant FDA approval. Eight years later, babies started dying. Was there a connection?

She rose from nothing to become the decorated head coach for women’s track and field at the University of Texas, winning six NCAA championships, sending countless athletes to the Olympics, and turning the school’s program into the country’s standard for excellence. Then Bev Kearney was abruptly forced to resign because of an illicit affair. But she didn’t get where she is by giving up without a fight.

Aboard Air Force One—during one of America’s most searing, perilous moments—a government was formed and a presidency begun.

[sub req’d] Julia Law was a pretty paralegal dating the city’s most famous defense attorney. But the story of how she ended up dead in his house in May is one of secrets and lies.

Fear and self-loathing on the Provincetown ferry, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the gay ghetto.

The baby boomers are slowing down while the millennials are speeding up. Maybe what the boomers need is ADHD medication.

On trying oysters.

A modern tale of life, death, and morbid Google searches.

I’ve always struggled with feeling like an outsider. By joining Mensa, could I find a place where I fit in?

A seven-day cruise with the controversial “downtrodden millionaire.”

An investigation into the disappearance of a 24-year-old British cruise ship activity director from the Disney Wonder opens the strange and insular world of cruise employees, who vanish mysteriously at alarming rates.

After losing a presidential election, 600 National Review subscribers hit the Caribbean.

The sinking of the Costa Concordia.

On board the Perl Whirl 2000, a conference of hard-coding geeks on a luxury cruise ship.

The Estonia was carrying 989 passengers when it sank in 30-foot seas on its way across the Baltic in September 1994. More than 850 perish.

Two thousand rednecks on the Chillin’ the Most Cruise.

Way before Ray Kurzweil, Keynes showed us what happens as exponential growth accumulates over time. His projections about how big the economy would become after decades of compounded growth sounded like lunacy to readers during the Great Depression but were amazingly accurate, as was his prediction that humanity would move past its “struggle for subsistence” within a century. At the same time, he overestimated how quickly the work week would get shorter – most of us are working a lot more hours than he envisioned.

This description of what Usenet is and how it works, written shortly before the Web exploded into the mainstream, got important things right: the net’s great variety and utility, its unruliness, and the overall spirit of helpfulness and sharing that persists more than two decades later.

Economist Julian Simon is an intellectual hero of ours. Throughout his underappreciated career he made the case that things were getting better instead of worse, backed up his arguments with masses of data, and won wagers against prominent Malthusians. This piece is a great introduction to his thinking, and gives him some of the recognition he’s due.

Before the Watson supercomputer trounced the two best human Jeopardy! players early in 2011, this article revealed its uncanny ability to mine vast amounts of text in search of answers to tough questions, and to navigate the punning and other wordplay that the quiz show throws at its contestants. This is one of the articles that made us say to each other “Something’s different now…”

Kasparov, a powerful writer, explains how computers came to dominate humans at chess and why this is not cause for alarm that they’ll soon be able to do everything better than we do. Chess has long been an exemplar of human intelligence, and increasingly a metaphor for how humans and machines may co-exist.

The digital economy is not just different, too often it’s invisible. Brian Arthur brings it to life with a description of all the ways it increasingly surrounds us. As “software eats the world”, to use Marc Andreessen’s evocative phrase, we’ll all need to get more and more familiar with this other economy.

Captures the palpable energy coming from San Francisco’s young technology entrepreneurs, who by perceiving no barriers are knocking a lot of them down. We share Heller’s sense that things are happening more quickly there than just about anyplace else.

For the data lovers among us, here’s a slew of encouraging trends from falling poverty and crime, to rising life expectancy, literacy and computer power. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but the positive numbers feed our optimism.

“Living a life is basically about you entering one situation after another that you may or may not want to enter. Everything has stakes, everything has meaning, everything has consequences.”

“Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Seeger’s life with folk music.

A transcript of Seeger’s testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

The real story behind Seeger’s classic “Wimoweh.”

“I would say every artist is, in effect, trying to figure how the human race can be saved from itself. So in those days when we sang for the union workers, and today when I go around and sing on a picket line, I’m not really being all that different. Artists who say ‘We’re only interested in art for art’s sake’ are fooling themselves, I think.”

A profile of Seeger at 84.

An excerpt from Little Failure.

A trip to Azerbaijan.

Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer.

The author on his love for the Russian language.

A profile of M.I.A.

The night it all went wrong.

A jailhouse interview with Steve Washak, who made millions selling “natural male enhancement” pills.

On Ambien and the search for the next blockbuster insomnia drug.

On the Adderall days of college.

New medicines can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Are they worth it? A look at how a pair of pharmaceutical companies set their prices.

The pharmaceutical quest to give women a better sex life.

During the last decade, more than 1,500 Americans died after accidentally taking too much of a drug renowned for its safety: acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

Fifty years ago, birth-control pills gave women control of their bodies, while making it easy to forget their basic biology—until, in some cases, it’s too late.

The story of Christopher and Jeffrey George, the twin proprietors of a pain clinic empire.

The Barden family after Newtown.

Along for the ride with a boatload of refugees risking their lives.

A rivalry gone awry.

Heartbreak at the edge of the earth.

The crumbling of an American icon.

The story of one of New York City’s 22,000 homeless children.

The multiple lives of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

How 19 of the 20 Granite Mountain Hotshots lost their lives.

How America’s heartland powers its coastal fantasies.

The murder of magic mushroom pioneer Steven Pollock.

Tales of mayhem on the set of The Canyons.

The secretive British men obsessed with the eggs of rare birds.

A haute couture confession.

Hippie surfers, a Spanish teacher and their weed empire.

A world-renowned physicist’s miscalculation.

The investigation that brought down K2 Productions.

Basketball’s iconoclast is a broke recluse at 37.

The hellacious childhood of two billionaires-to-be.

The story behind the spectacle.

He was a villain. She was a victim. It wasn’t that simple.

The trial of a 10-year-old who murdered his neo-Nazi father.

Escaping with Kink.com’s Princess Donna Dolore.

Parsing the lives of middle-class twentysomethings.

Young love and an apartment filled with heavy weaponry.

Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his show.

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse.

How adoptive parents give their problem children away.

Biogenesis and the final fall of Alex Rodriguez.

The plight of temporary workers in America.

Where donation dollars actually go.

A long vacation to the Siberian wilderness.

How the corpses of Hitler’s victims haunt modern science.

When New Yorkers lived knee-deep in trash.

How the Hollywood publicity racket evolved.

What people have eaten when they’ll never eat again.