Speaking to a group that started their college lives in September, 2001, the host of The Daily Show embraces how difficult the real world is:

I want to address is the idea that somehow this new generation is not as prepared for the sacrifice and the tenacity that will be needed in the difficult times ahead. I have not found this generation to be cynical or apathetic or selfish. They are as strong and as decent as any people that I have met. And I will say this, on my way down here I stopped at Bethesda Naval, and when you talk to the young kids that are there that have just been back from Iraq and Afghanistan, you don’t have the worry about the future that you hear from so many that are not a part of this generation but judging it from above.

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

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 34-year-old virgin father-of-15 at the forefront of the controversial DIY sperm donation movement.

In her fight to end sexual abuse, the Olympic champion is challenging the very institutions she led to glory.

Black men and women are still dying across the country. The power that is American policing has conceded nothing.

The rise and (potential) fall of the electronics superstore.

How the United States came to spend more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined.

The “insane playfulness, deliberate infantilism, nutty haikus, naked stripteases, free-form chants and literary war dances of the beats” and their leader.

The story of the Caughnawagas, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” and their gradual assimilation.

The original article on Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, published a month before the release of Moneyball.

The controversial owner of the Dallas World Aquarium once nearly caused a riot over pygmy sloths.

Al-Jazeera English dominated the international coverage of the 2008-2009 Gaza war. And now it’s poised to invade North America.

Life as a New York Times reporter in the shadow of the war on terror.

Beatrice White, the Toronto girl who won the city’s turn-of-the-century fly-swatting contest.

For the past 70 years, the Circle L 5 Riding Club in Fort Worth has been honoring the legacy of its forefathers.

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

On the closing of New York’s Fulton Fish Market.

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada, Florida, and the squid-ink East River. Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented ice. This fragrance of fish and man pinpoints one place in the New York vastness: a small stretch of South Street where peddlers have sung the song of the catch since at least 1831, while all around them, change. They were hawking fish here when an ale house called McSorley's opened up; when a presidential aspirant named Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union; when the building of a bridge to Brooklyn ruined their upriver view.

When ‘Ceca’, the Madonna of the Balkans, met Arkan, bank robber turned paramilitary leader and war criminal, and how it all came to a tragic end in the lobby of the Belgrade Intercontinental.

An explanation of enduring distaste.

On the decline of America.

Navigating the alligator-infested rivers of North Florida.

The story of an American myth.

Portraits of the 99 percent.