An account of the trial of Warren Jeffs, the polygamous prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The travails of mattress salesmen on one of the busiest weekends of the year.

A profile of the (now former) director of the House of Dior, John Galliano.

Survivors of China’s campaign of persecution reveal the scope of the devastation.

A profile of Robert Cade, a University of Florida professor and inventor of Gatorade.

The economics of climate change and the end of humanity.

On the fallibility of memory.

A profile of A.J. Daulerio, editor of Deadspin and procurer of, among other things, cell phone pics of Brett Favre’s penis.

China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang.

On the eve of the release of The Tree of Life, a look back at the turbulent making of Terence Malick’s debut.

Every year, members of the Gold Prospectors Association of America pack up their RVs in search of adventure, friendship, and a bucketful of pay dirt.

A stylized account of the fall of ant colony.

The psychology of trolling.

On the sex lives of the castrati.

In defense of fiction.

“Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”

The Wikileaks-released documents regarding the polonium-poisoning assassination of Alexander V. Litvinenko speak to the potential involvement of both British and Russian security agencies and hint at the disappearance of a plane that bore evidence of the transport of polonium.

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.