Colin Powell’s battle with the Bush administration.

On the Miss America pageant.

Visiting the site of the Chernobyl meltdown.

Blockbusters in the age of “corporate irony.”

The behind-the-scenes publishing saga of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel.

On Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and the genesis of the Kindle.

The rewards and pitfalls of selling haunted objects.

Looking for the ghosts of the Allman Brothers Band in Macon.

The art of the voiceover.

Exploring the darkest corridors of the Internet.

An autopsy of the San Jose Mercury News.

A history of the fowl.

How smallpox went from eradicated disease to the ideal weapon of bioterrorists.

On the underground doctors unleashing the healing powers of hallucinogens.

On the new art of interrogation.

The billionaire founder of Renaissance Technologies turns to science.

How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.

An oral history of the war in Afghanistan.

Inside the campaign of Joe Biden, “the least formidable front-runner ever.”

The British and Irish have coined some fabulous terms to describe nature and landscrape. “Doofers” is the Scots’ term for horse-shit; “clinkerbell” means icicle in Hampshire.

A conversation with the comedian.

JW: You’ve talked about how you’ve had to explain moral lessons to your daughters, but do it in an inarticulate, catchy way. It’s almost as though you’re writing material for them. What’s the place of morality and ethics in your comedy? I think those are questions people live with all the time, and I think there’s a lazy not answering of them now, everyone sheepishly goes, “Oh, I’m just not doing it, I’m not doing the right thing.” There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don’t know what that is, I’m really curious about that. I’m really curious about what people think they’re doing when they’re doing something evil, casually.

Before ending up in Rikers, Jeremy Wilson — if that’s his real name — had portrayed himself as a Scottish-born DJ, a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer, a professor at MIT, an Apple executive, a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and an Irish mobster. Among others.

“If I’m writing a thing based on something that happened, it often starts to become fun for me when I see there’s an opportunity to make myself look even more of a jerk than I am in real life.”