What prompts a woman to exit society and marry God? Inside a modern convent in Texas.

The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells.

Elias Pompa is the lone deputy in one of the poorest counties in Texas. He is also at the center of the U.S. border crisis.

On the dying city of Port Arthur, Texas, and one man’s fight to save it.

Turning down the huge amounts of money a fracking contract can offer is always the beginning of a fight.

How one immigration court in Texas has shut the door on those seeking refuge in America.

A dispatch from Eloise Woods, a natural burial ground where bodies are consigned directly to the earth.

A 2016 investigation into why Houston wasn’t ready for the next big hurricane.

A Texas con artist made millions promising prisoners’ families the thing they wanted most: to bring their children home.

A visit to a colonial debutante ball in Texas, where girls wear hundred-pound dresses and pretend to be Martha Washington.

A history of a small Texas town deep in the Chihuahuan desert:

The isolation is such that if you laid out the islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, and the deep ocean channels that separate them, on the road between Marfa and the East Texas of strip shopping and George Bush Jr., you’d still have 100 miles of blank highway stretching away in front of you.

The Columbia shuttle was to be a revolution for NASA. But a year before its first launch, the shuttle was several years behind schedule, had cost $1 billion, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever get off the ground.

A profile of Mitch Landrieu, the first white mayor of New Orleans in nearly 30 years–part of a larger post-Katrina trend in the city’s politics. “The elected leadership looks almost like a photo negative of the pre-Katrina government.”

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.

In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.

On Edward Tufte, the  great data visualization (read: charts and graphs) theorist and author of 1983’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, one of the most successful self-published books ever produced.

Across the country, little-known schools are accepting almost everyone who applies, cashing a lot of checks, and offering so little support that only the most determined students leave with a degree.

At first, Don Huckstep was perplexed that his fiancée would abruptly cut off contact before a long-awaited trip to Italy. Then a bizarre and grisly set of discoveries unfolded.

The story of mediatakeout.com, a gossip site with a monthly audience of 16 million and a loose relationship with the truth.

How Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, with a little help from the Bush Administration, got 140 trees chopped down in a national park to improve his view and ruined the life of a park ranger in the process.

He was arrested for pushing his three grandsons so hard on a Grand Canyon hike that rangers feared for their lives. Their account of the summer they spent with their youthful grandpa would include an uncanny understanding of marijuana strains and a stopover in Jamaica.

A profile of Tom Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the sixth-highest paid lobbyist in the country. Since Obama took office, Donohue has scared-up tens of millions in new donations.

When the Feds sought the death penalty for four African-American drug dealers in Baltimore, the accused found a defense in the unlikeliest of places: the legal theories of white supremacists.

Rebecca Raffle came to Indianapolis from Los Angeles with dreams of building a cannabis empire. She introduced herself as a West Coast #girlboss, SEO ninja, LGBTQ Family, and avid baker. But she was altogether something different.