South of San Francisco, in a fertile corner of California that feeds much of the country, working families are sleeping in shelters and parking lots.

Accused money launderers left a path of bankrupt factories, shuttered buildings, and hundreds of steelworkers out of jobs.

How the author of Friday Night Lights spent more than half a million dollars over three years on “eighty-one leather jackets, seventy-five pairs of boots, forty-one pairs of leather pants, thirty-two pairs of haute couture jeans, ten evening jackets, and 115 pairs of leather gloves.”

The decade-long journey of a novel–Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding–through the unpredictable world of book publishing.

On spending six months on the southern coast of Argentina with the “Jane Goodall of penguins” and several hundred of her research subjects.

On Norman Bel Geddes, pioneer of miniatures and maker of the “most iconic World’s Fair exhibit of all time.”

A profile of Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka Sabu, a hacker star of Anonymous and resident of a New York City housing project.

Colombian traffickers have a new smuggling method of choice: specially designed submarines capable of carrying 10 tons of cocaine and covering 2,000 miles without refueling.

An indecent proposal, a crime of passion, and legends of murder in an enclave of bohemian retirees.

For years he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then his victims banded together to take him down.

With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.

A review of several books on Rupert Murdoch first criticizes the authors for not grasping the many sides of their subject, then offers a thesis of its own. He’s “not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a portrait of the modern world.”

A survivor of conversion therapy gets the wedding of her dreams.

The history of a color.

On disposing of a dead sea lion, and the pitfalls of memory.

An assessment of the former Secretary of the Treasury.

On a biography of David Foster Wallace.

Behind the scenes of the lovely, strange world of competitive eating.

A profile of Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountain climber of all time.

A profile of Google’s new CEO, “the most powerful tech giant you’ve never heard of.”

Facing the inevitability of taking over care for someone who can’t take care of themselves.

The death of a Russian dissident and how radioactive poison became a tool of assassins.

An Englishman’s eighteen years of exile-by-choice.

The complicated process of ghostwriting Julian Assange’s autobiography.