For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

“In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He’s feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.”

On the Red Sox’s historic implosion:

Drinking beer in the Sox clubhouse is permissible. So is ordering take-out chicken and biscuits. Playing video games on one of the clubhouse’s flat-screen televisions is OK, too. But for the Sox pitching trio to do all three during games, rather than show solidarity with their teammates in the dugout, violated an unwritten rule that players support each other, especially in times of crisis.

The story of a sheriff’s deputy in Minnesota who took his own life.

"If anything happens to me," Ruettimann said, "give this to the reporter." After Ruettimann's death, Hereaux took the file down off his desk. Inside was a thick stack of loose-leaf documents, a manila folder stuffed with letters, and a catalog-size clasp envelope labeled "Reports." Written in black permanent marker in the margin of the envelope was the reporter's name: mine.

An essay on working at Sotheby’s.

Art pricing is not absolute magic; there are certain rules, which to an outsider can sound parodic. Paintings with red in them usually sell for more than paintings without red in them. Warhol’s women are worth more, on average, than Warhol’s men. The reason for this is a rhetorical question, asked in a smooth continental accent: “Who would want the face of some man on their wall?”

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.

The story of Max Factor, a Polish immigrant who revoltuionized Hollywood cosmetics starting in the 1920s, and his “Beauty Calibrator” machine.

What led to the death of a 5-year-old boy, “the Everychild in the state system.”

A final visit with late boxer Teófilo Stevenson, who could have fought or even been Muhammad Ali had he not stayed in Cuba.

Untangling the aftermath of a United States drone strike in Yemen.

A profile of the highest-paid female executive in America, who was born male.

The profile of a 34-year-old woman named Charity Johnson who tricked people all over the country into believing she was still in high school.

The writer is reluctantly whisked away to to a small house in upstate New York to attend an ayhuasca ceremony with six strangers.

Monaco’s richest woman was shot in ambush outside a hospital. Her heirs stand to inherit over a billion dollars each.

A judge on the history and injustice of the plea bargain in America.

Sex and status disclosure in the age of Grindr and undetectable HIV-levels.

How one woman is monitoring the jihadi network from a home office in Montana.

In the 1970s, Chile was on the verge of developing sophisticated technology to monitor its economy. Then America intervened.

On William Cockford and his 1800s gambling hall in London, where much of the British aristocracy lost its fortune.

The disappearance of the mysterious “Pakistani asset” that helped the CIA zero in on Bin Laden.

Thousands of new warehouse jobs were supposed to help lift a struggling British economy. Instead, employees started equating the work with “being in a slave camp.”

It was a 3-mile footrace. Thousands were in attendance. So how did Michael LeMaitre disappear?

“The first time I was ever published in a book was 1997. It was because I found Roger Ebert’s email and asked him a question.”