The story of September 26, 2014, the day 43 Mexican students went missing.

The story of a national obsession.

On the front lines of the labor movement.

An argument on the meaning of Cubism settled.

Behold the marvel of the animal’s fabrication.

The rise and stunning collapse of a cybersecurity firm.

On the future of air travel.

The Canadian scapegoat of the AIDS epidemic.

On a thin sliver of land called Rojava where “rules of the neighboring ISIS caliphate ha[ve] been inverted,” a Kurdish Syrian college trains its future autonomous leaders.

They were pillars of their communities and families, and they are not replaceable. To understand why COVID-19 killed so many young Black men, you need to know the legend of John Henry.

A personal history of Soldier of Fortune magazine and the mercenary-wannabes who read and wrote it.

“We can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money.”

How a longtime gambling addict and a small band of his cronies manipulated both the game and betting exchanges from a tiny Berlin cafe, going as far as buying ownerships of teams in order to insure their failure.

During his nearly six years in the Air Force, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant flew hundreds of missions and logged almost 6,000 hours of flight time. He killed or helped kill 1,626 people. And he never left Nevada.

A visit to the French hideaway of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, who had avoided arrest on murder charges for nearly 20 years.

From our guide to fugitives for Slate.

“We must be grateful for the smallest of blessings. Last week I saw and heard some things that provided a measure of hope and nuance in these grim and hysterical times.”

“I had inherited a Rolodex full of useful phone numbers (the College Board, a helpful counselor in the UCLA admissions office), but the number I kept handing out was that of a family therapist.”

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

400,000 Wiki-leaked reports that confirm the minute-by-minute misadventures of a “military at war with its own inner demons” in the unforgiving terrain of Iraq.

The night the doctor behind the Scarsdale Diet was shot by his mistress, the impeccable headmistress of the elite all-girls boarding school Madeira.

The importance of the sports metaphor in the American consciousness and why Lewis Lapham didn’t join the C.I.A.

The little-understood history of the whales and how barnacles may be the key to understanding how giant mammals evolved underwater.

A technical, thrilling account of how Pinboard, a tiny bookmarking service, dealt with the fire hose of new users after news leaked that Yahoo would discontinue Pinboard’s massive rival, Delicious.

The story of one man’s descent into lies and illegal activity – and why it could so easily happen to any of us.

A history.

 The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity.