One man’s quest to save the music of the Holocaust.

A forgotten birthday cake sets off a chain of unexpected events.

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A profile of Heather Armstrong, a mom in Salt Lake City who has more than 1.5 million Twitter followers and a personal blog generating $30,000-$50,000 monthly.

How a doctor and an S.A.C. trader got entangled in a financial scandal.

Baseball legend Lenny Dykstra’s on-field brilliance and private-life disasters, from drunk driving to failed investment and publishing ventures.

A Hells Angel informant’s path from destruction to redemption and back, and a family’s trouble with witness protection.

Romney’s former Bain partner makes a case for inequality.

Police and scientists investigate an outbreak.

Controversy following a climbing disaster that killed eight.

No one knew her secret. Until they did.

Short-seller Andrew Left sniffs out corporate fraud—and gets rich doing it.

“My cousin became a convicted felon in his teens. I tried to make sure he got a second chance. What went wrong?”

Could Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump goad each other into a devastating confrontation?

Life as a young actor when you’re about to become a movie star.

How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product.

National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But—somehow, for some reason—Weird Al keeps rocking.

How a state that was never in doubt became a “national embarrassment.”

A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:

The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.

A grandmother from Chicago, she’s one of those people who knows everybody. And those people who know everybody, the connectors, make the world work. A study of the power of (offline) social networking.

This is the piece of writing that inspired me to make the turn from fiction and corporate research into journalism. It’s the best reframing of American society that I’ve ever read. And kudos to Harper’s for running it. It’s not often you see anarchist anthropologists making highly visible contributions to public discourse.

-A. Madrigal

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

“I come to America, I go to England, I go to France…nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure. … It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk—in their personal life.”

A son, the illusion of his dead father and where technology intersects with real life.

A woman bonds with her terminally ill sister over food, memories, and shaky lives.

“Editing is crucial because in my experience anything you try to make - what YOU want is for the story to be AMAZING. But what the story wants to be is MEDIOCRE OR WORSE. And the entire process of making the story is convincing the story to not be what it wants to be, which is BAD.”