While accused killer Robert Durst was in Galveston, he made a few friends besides Morris Black.

There are two roles to play in the new world of on-demand everything: royalty or servant.

A mayday call in the critical moments after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform.

The shooting death of the last wild Passenger Pigeon, atomic energy, mastodon watering holes, and other footnotes in Ohio history.

Alaska brims with stories of people who vanish and are given up for dead. Once in a while, the dead return.

Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial Day weekend in Chicago.

A Marxist archaeologist uncovers traces of fugitive slave settlements deep in the Great Dismal Swamp.

Learning to live in Earth’s coldest conditions.

John Franzese Jr. helped send his father, notorious Colombo family mobster Sonny Franzese, to prison. Then he turned up in Indianapolis.

How the tiny town of Roundup, Montana became a hub in Amazon’s supply chain.

Filipino teachers, hired to fill historic shortages in the South and elsewhere, fight their exploitation by opportunistic recruiters.

The dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers.

How child molesters get away with it.

On a 1955 ferris wheel accident.

When the Champ met Castro.

The legacy of Benihana.

A healthcare nightmare.

An essay on insomnia.

An argument for working less.

An advertising copywriter adjusts to daily life in Paris, and works in a dysfunctional office.

Office culture in Paris held that it was each person's responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people's desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties' personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk. Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

“In all his life, this was the moment of his greatest defeat.” On the death of George McGovern’s daughter on a cold winter night in Madison, Wisconsin.

A local reporter set out to profile the celebrated writer. He ended up lampooned in The New Yorker.

Excerpted from Updike.

For decades, “trimmigrants” have flooded California’s Emerald Triangle during harvest season in search of highly paid seasonal work. In the isolation of the dense forest, sexual assault is commonplace and rarely investigated.

In the days after 9/11, Mark Stroman went on a revenge killing spree in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan survived and, a decade later, tried to stop Stroman’s execution.

An oral history of a family in Mexico City, in transition from poverty to the lower-middle class, as they scramble to organize the burial of a slum-dwelling aunt.