On the death of David Carr.

On office chairs.

In the 1950s and '60s, the distinctions between rank found blunt expression in chair design, naming and price point; Knoll, for example, produced "Executive," "Advanced Management," and "Basic Operational" chairs in the late 1970s. Recall the archetypal scenes where the boss, back to the door, protected by an exaggerated, double-spine headrest, slowly swivels around to meet the eyes of his waiting subordinate, impotent in a stationary four-legger.

A year after her death, a tribute to the Saturday Night Live star who didn’t want to be on TV.

An interview on craft:

Writing The Subs in three nights was really a fantastic athletic feat as well as mental, you shoulda seen me after I was done...I was pale as a sheet and had lost fifteen pounds and looked strange in the mirror.

“We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. It’s impossible not to—I mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldn’t write it. You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it.”

The schism at the heart of cosmology.

Life at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s.

An excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

On Aint It Cool News’ Harry Knowles, who built an influential empire on insider movie news while wheelchair-bound and at one point weighing over 500 pounds, then lost it all.

How a struggling comedian became a pimp who eventually started sending teenage hookers on bank robbery missions that earned them notoriety as the “Starlet Bandits.”

Dikembe Mutombo, humanitarian and former NBA center, and oil executive Kase Lawal arrange a ill-fated deal to buy $30 million in gold in Kenya.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu project began in 1960 and was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. It didn't go that way.

Update: The software was finally, quietly released in April.

The material powers solar panels and microchips. In Alabama, two thieves cashed in.

Mark Karpelès ran the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until a heist made it insolvent, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement in Japanese prison.

At age 17, Bonnie Richardson won the Texas state track team championship all by herself. Then she did it again.

The Permian Basin is booming with oil. But at what cost to West Texans? Though some will reap serious profits, the region’s dealing with skyrocketing rents, overcrowded schools, and potholes as big as VW Beetles.

On losing a mother and a marriage.

An encounter with Emerson’s essays.

Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. They didn’t know each other, and never would. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery.

An internet huckster got rich selling a sex enhancement supplement named Stiff Nights. Then the FDA sampled his wares.

Arriving in China at 23, Sidney Rittenberg spent 35 years as a “friend, confidante, translator, and journalist” for the Communist Party’s top leaders. In this interview, he recalls both his friendship with Chairman Mao and the 16 years he spent in solitary confinement.

The story of H1N1 and one of the lives it claimed.

An examination of the funeral industry.

The heroes of the Boston Marathon bombing.

The jury room was a gray-green, institutional rectangle: coat hooks on the wall, two small bathrooms off to one side, a long, scarred table surrounded by wooden armchairs, wastebaskets, and a floor superficially clean, deeply filthy. We entered this room on a Friday at noon, most of us expecting to be gone from it by four or five that same day. We did not see the last of it until a full twelve hours had elapsed, by which time the grimy oppressiveness of the place had become, for me at least, inextricably bound up with psychological defeat.