How the case of a poisoned college student in China, cold for 18 years, has suddenly turned into “what may be the largest amateur online manhunt in history.”

An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”

Cycles of boom and bust in the drilling town of Williston, N.D., as seen from the perspective of an itinerant dancer filling one of three slots at the only strip club in town, Whispers.

Al Seckel held legendary parties in the 1980s and 90s, with attendees ranging from Slash to Francis Crick. He later became a collector of optical illusions and gave a TED talk on the topic. He may have also misled and defrauded many of the people he came into contact with.

A profile of Judy Clarke, who takes on the most heinous, notorious defendants in America, trying to save them from the death penalty. Until Dzokhar Tsarnaev, she usually succeeded.

When rival gangs confronted each other in the parking lot of a Hooters-esque restaurant, bullets flew. But was the whole a police setup?

For almost 20 years, Greg Torti has lived the life of a convicted sex offender—carrying a blue ID card with him at all times, avoiding schools and parks, living on the outskirts of town. It’s a just punishment for the crime, he says. It’s just that he didn’t commit it.

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.

A charismatic entrepreneur, an ex-con turned devout Christian, and the politicians who championed them.

The story of a $36 billion Ponzi scheme in Minnesota.

On the mid-sixties birth of America’s underground newspaper movement and the rise of The Realist, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and more.

You can have a PhD from Yale. You can be a rising star in the State Department. And you can still find yourself being investigated by the FBI for espionage.

In trailers just minutes from the Vegas Strip, Air Force pilots control predators over Iraq and Afghanistan. A case study in the marvels—and limits—of modern military technology.

A review of Treme, the new HBO show about post-Katrina New Orleans from David Simon, creator of The Wire. “The series virtually prohibits you from loving it,” Franklin writes, “while asking you to value it.”

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.

Jung’s ‘Red Book’, a secret journal of dreams and drawings, has been in a Swiss vault for the better part of a century. The burden of its care has fallen on his descendants, who have reluctantly allowed it to be published.

Buckminster Fuller reconsidered.

A Wikipedia-style dissection of the case that inspired The Fugitive. The accused, Dr. Sam Sheppard, claimed to have struggled with an intruder before being knocked out and dumped on a beach, his wife’s left corpse in their house.

The criminologist/lawyer who created Perry Mason unravels the Boston Strangler case, in which eleven women were murdered by an assailant they willingly let into their homes.

How Zion, Ill., a fundamentalist Christian settlement with a population of 6,250, created one of the most popular stations in the country during the early days of radio.

In 2001, Maksym Igor Popov defected to work as an informant in the U.S. But a decade later, he was back to scamming the FBI.

“Political argument has been having a terrible century. Instead of arguing, everyone from next-door neighbors to members of Congress has got used to doing the I.R.L. equivalent of posting to the comments section: serially fulminating.”

Real-estate mogul Charles Kushner had been cast out of power, found guilty of a strange bundle of crimes including “secretly setting up [his brother-in-law] with a prostitute, then taping the encounter.” His son Jared, then 23, was left to carry the ambition for the both of them.

In 1977, Johanna van Haarlem finally tracked down the son, Erwin, she had abandoned as a baby 33 years earlier. She immediately travelled to London to meet him. It was the perfect cover.

A primer.