“The supernatural stuff doesn’t get to me anymore. But here’s the movie that scared me the most in the last 12 or 13 years: The movie opens with a woman in late middle-age, sitting at a table and writing a story. And the story goes something like, then the branches creaked in the - and she stops, and she says to her husband: What are those things? I can’t think of them. They’re in the backyard, and they’re very tall, and birds land on the branches. And he says, why, Iris, those are trees. And she says, yes, how silly of me. And she writes the word, and the movie starts. That’s Iris Murdoch, and she’s suffering the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.”

How to drive across America in less than 32 hours and 7 minutes.

How General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, became the most powerful intelligence officer in U.S. history.

A profile of Ken Feinberg, lawyer who specializes in determining compensation after tragedies and disasters.

On the lesbian separatists of the 1970s, who “created a shadow society devoted to living in an alternate, penisless reality.”

A Nepali immigrant tries to survive, and support a family back home, on a cab driver’s wages in Qatar.

The producer of Big Star’s Third and piano player on ‘Wild Horses’ recounts a life of music in Memphis.

The writer reconnects with an old acquaintance who ten years earlier committed one of the most notorious crimes in New York history.

What seems like a slam-dunk case against a mass murderer exposes widespread prosecutorial misconduct in Orange County.

Investigating an astrophysicist’s sudden death at an isolated resesarch base in Antarctica.

There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. This is one of their stories.

For centuries, a little town in Belgium has been treating the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful?

In 1995, Ramirez allegedly raped Patricia Esparza. He was tortured and killed weeks later. Now she’s charged with his murder. Is she responsible?

How a man of little education and little means invented a simple machine that changed the lives of women in rural India.

Searching for the mysterious tree kangaroo in one of the most remote places on Earth.

On the discovery of a billion dollars worth of artwork looted by Nazis in the cramped apartment of a Munich recluse.

On children accused of sorcery in Congo.

The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

What it means to be an entrepreneur in Argentina, where economic crashes are a way of life.

The coldest of cases: During 1884-85, seven women and one man were brutally murdered in Austin, Texas.

On the culture of plastic surgery in Los Angeles, and how the reporter’s life changed when she got a pair of fake boobs.

When the greatest players in the world go head-to-head, things can get downright angsty.

A tony bedroom community in Los Angeles, a kidnapping gone horribly wrong, and the birth of a teenage fugitive.

An interview with the author.

"We live in a frightened time and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions. That is one of the great damaging aspects of what has happened in the last 20 years. Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.' I am a writer. I write books."