“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. I mean really, no fear!”

How Dennis from Head of the Class grew up to be the Aaron Sorkin of tween television.

How Lalit Modi built a billion-dollar cricket empire—only to be exiled from his sport and homeland.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

The birth of the Beastie Boys—an oral history on the 25th anniversary of Licensed to Ill.

As “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” comes to an end, a conversation with gay servicemen past and present.

On the dying city of Port Arthur, Texas, and one man’s fight to save it.

What it means to become a superpower while three quarters of the population lives on less than fifty cents per day—four scenes from India in transition.

Retirement for chimps is, in its way, a perversely natural outcome, which is to say, one that only we, the most cranially endowed of the primates, could have possibly concocted. It's the final manifestation of the irrepressible and ultimately vain human impulse to bring inside the very walls that we erect against the wilderness its most inspiring representatives -- the chimps, our closest biological kin, the animal whose startling resemblance to us, both outward and inward, has long made it a ''can't miss'' for movies and Super Bowl commercials and a ''must have'' in our laboratories. Retirement homes are, in a sense, where we've been trying to get chimps all along: right next door.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

“The Anonymous mystique had allowed a group of incompetents to hijack, then discredit, an important grassroots movement in the eyes of national media.”

A group of journalists and researchers wade into ugly corners of the Internet to expose racists, creeps, and hypocrites. Have they gone too far?

How Sinclair Broadcast Group bent the rules, bought politicians, and faked the news to become one of the largest independent owners of television stations in America.

The man behind the craze for fermented alcoholic tea likes to tell the story of his own conception.

An eyewitness tells us what it was like to be there.

A drag pageant pioneer dropped out of the public eye after the 1960s. What happened to her?

The former Beastie Boy, 48, tries to figure out what’s next.

How Ross Ulbricht went from idealistic used-book seller to murderous drug kingpin.

The multimillionaire David Gundlach had trouble, all his life, reading social cues. For reasons no one quite understands, he left most of his fortune to Elkhart, Indiana.

Football-related brain damage made Rickie Harris fall from the heights of the NFL to serving a DUI sentence in his ex-wife’s basement.

A controversial effort divides students by race in order to combat racism.

Investigating the death of Rikers Island women’s jail inmate Jackie Caquias, and other abuses of women prisoners’ access to medical care.

Prosecutors have spun creative theories to explain away scientific evidence when DNA tests haven’t fit their version of events.

On February 10, 1982, Lucy Dixon’s daughter was raped. Against all odds, she and her family brought the man to justice.

A critical look at the contemporary art marketplace.

The trouble is that a business model has come to drive the entire art world, and like the corporate executive who regards the launch of each new product as a challenge to the success of the last one, because you must keep growing or you will die, the arts community finds itself in a state of permanent anxiety. There always has to be a new artist whom the media will embrace as enthusiastically as they embraced Warhol; there always has to be a show that will top the excitement generated by the last blockbuster at the Modern or the Met.