Welcome to Toke-la-homa.

On trying, and failing, to qualify for the USA Olympic Marathon Trials.

A writer reckons with his debts, both financial and personal.

How Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld became Yale Law pariahs.

An oral history of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Did people first come to this continent by land or by sea?

In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for starting a fire that killed his three daughters. The case hinged on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Johnny E. Webb. Today, Webb says he lied.

At 9:14pm on November 22, 1987, sportscaster Dan Roan was doing the Bears highlights on Chicago’s WGN-TV when the station’s signal was hijacked. Someone wearning a rubber Max Headroom mask appeared, silently, on TV screens around the city. A few hours later, Headroom popped up again on another channel, this time for longer and with audio. Despite FBI and FCC investigations, the case remains unsolved.

On riding China’s Qinghai-Tibet Railway just before it opened:

Staring out at the shimmering tracks and concrete-reinforced embankment extending to the horizon, I can’t help but think of the senior Chinese scientist who confessed to me that the rail line he helped build might not be safe for long.

Inside the ultra-Orthodox Jewish rally at Citi Field to discuss the dangers of the internet:

A man in a black fur hat asked him what, exactly, was an app, and he explained it to him. The man grimaced and walked away.

The macabre, ultra-violent plays put on at the Grand Guignol defined an era in Paris, attracting foreign tourists, aristocrats, and celebrities. Goering and Patton saw plays there in the same year. But the carnage of WWII ultimately undermined the shock of Guignol’s brutality, and audiences disappeared.

"The couple tried to make them leave. They complained to the police. When that didn’t work, they tried to build friendships, hoping they could charm the squatters into respecting their property. Sometimes, they hid in their house. For three years, the tension built. Until one sweltering summer night in 2016."

How MSG became “perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food.”

They advertise murder for hire but work for the government. Inside the world of America’s fake hit men.

A cave in Russia, a long-lost tip of a pinkie bone, and the discovery of a new kind of human being.

How a 20-something made millions as an e-commerce hustler.

How Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, all nine-sixteenths of a second of it, changed TV, the internet, and American culture.

An adventure on the Beringia, a dog sled race stretching 685 miles over Russia’s frozen tundra.

Trying to understand the appeal of Eve Online.

Paul Bremer was briefly the Bush administration’s point person in Iraq. His decisions would have lasting consequences.

How the heir to the Hart wrestling dynasty burned every bridge from Canada to Mexico.

She believed she had survived the worst time of her life. But there was more to come.

How one of the world’s foremost Beatles collectors died homeless on the streets of Little Rock.

A pro-Ukraine activist goes silent in separatist-held Donetsk. A foreign correspondent goes looking for him.

Exploring the crime-ridden depths of the internet with Opsec, a former professional hacker.