On the elegance and utility of the rice cooker.

A profile of Rafael Pérez, an infamously corrupt LAPD officer and the inspiration behind the Vic Mackey character on The Shield.

“Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has.”

How the “biggest grow op willing to publish its address” could make Canada an international pioneer in the legalization and commercialization of weed.

The director of The Exorcist visits the Vatican’s 91-year-old in-house exorcist in Rome.

In many countries, journalists are being targeted because of the role they play in ensuring a free and informed society.

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

An actor, fresh from prison, attempts to reconnect with his son in 1950s California.

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A Q&A:

My mother was called to school frequently because I was yelling out things in class, quips in class, and because I would hand in compositions that they thought were in poor taste, or too sexual. Many, many times she was called to school.

While much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

The corruption and cruelty of the state’s response to suspected jihadis and their families seem likely to lead to the resurgence of the terror group.

On the segregation of Slovakia’s Gypsies.

The downfall of Hugo Schwyzer, feminist.

An oral history of “Page Six.”

The catfishing of Chris Andersen.

The construction of a modern American myth.

The angry last days of Ty Cobb.

A short history of leisure.

The changing face of Appalachia.

The many lives of imposter Frédéric Bourdin.

The author’s then-six-year-old ended up with the original artwork for one of the cards in Magic’s Alpha series—but he’s not selling, so don’t even ask.

A chance encounter with a movie star on an airplane.

John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed.

A decade-long Internet hoax unravels.

In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.