“In all his life, this was the moment of his greatest defeat.” On the death of George McGovern’s daughter on a cold winter night in Madison, Wisconsin.

A local reporter set out to profile the celebrated writer. He ended up lampooned in The New Yorker.

Excerpted from Updike.

For decades, “trimmigrants” have flooded California’s Emerald Triangle during harvest season in search of highly paid seasonal work. In the isolation of the dense forest, sexual assault is commonplace and rarely investigated.

In the days after 9/11, Mark Stroman went on a revenge killing spree in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan survived and, a decade later, tried to stop Stroman’s execution.

An oral history of a family in Mexico City, in transition from poverty to the lower-middle class, as they scramble to organize the burial of a slum-dwelling aunt.

The President received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.

While many trans athletes have become political lightning rods, nonbinary people like Layshia Clarendon are left out of the conversation. In a sex-segregated sports world, where do they fit in?

An advertising copywriter adjusts to daily life in Paris, and works in a dysfunctional office.

Office culture in Paris held that it was each person's responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people's desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties' personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk. Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

On driving (and walking) in the Middle East – from Syria to Lebanon, across Saudi Arabia to Dammam, in a taxi through war-torn Beirut.

For decades, dozens of men with intellectual disabilities lived in an old schoolhouse and did gruesome work in a turkey plant for subminimum wage. No one noticed.

“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements.”

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.

On the rise of telemedicine in rural America, where the number of ER patients has surged by 60 percent in the past decade as the number of doctors and hospitals has declined by up to 15 percent.

In just a few years, a Michigan woman took in millions of dollars, faking adoptions and ruining families’ lives along the way.

Suzan Russaw is 70 years old. She lived in affordable Palo Alto housing for decades. Then, in 2013, she was forced to move into her car. On the new homeless of Silicon Valley.

The story of Ota Benga, captured in the Congo, displayed at the World’s Fair, and brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

When Clark Rockefeller snatched his daughter during a custody dispute, what the D.A. called “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career” came unraveled, and the trail led to bones buried in a California backyard.

A bitter legal row over a mosque in an affluent New Jersey town shows the new face of Islamophobia in the age of Trump.

When it’s finished, architect Adrian Smith’s Jeddah Tower will be the tallest building in the world, over a kilometer high. He’s already thinking about pushing past a mile in the air.

Trawick was alone in his apartment when an officer pushed open the door. He was holding a bread knife and a stick. “Why are you in my home?” he asked. He never got an answer.

Tracking down 40-odd members of the British band.

It's a Tuesday morning in December, and I'm ringing people called Brown in Rotherham. "Hello," I begin again. "I'm trying to trace Jonnie Brown who used to play in the Fall. He came from Rotherham and I wondered if you might be a relative." "The Who?" asks the latest Mr Brown. "No. The Fall - the band from Salford. He played bass for three weeks in 1978." "Is this some kind of joke?"

Activities include: getting his own stem cells injected into his body every six months, taking 100 supplements a day, following a strict diet, bathing in infrared light, hanging out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wearing yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane.

Murder in the Juarez Valley:

A few weeks after Saul Reyes and his family fled Mexico, I drove to an immigrant shelter in downtown El Paso to see him. As the former city secretary of Guadalupe, Saul had once been in charge of recording the births and deaths of everyone in his hometown. He’d taken it upon himself now to collect every single name of those who had died or disappeared in Guadalupe since the killing began in 2008. Through media reports and meetings with the many valley exiles now living in Texas, Saul had compiled a list of the town’s dead and disappeared. Showing me the book, he turned page after page of names. So far he had counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and eight unknown bodies dumped in his small town of 3,000 people. “There are a lot more, but these are the ones I’ve been able to collect,” he said. In his careful, spidery script, he had written on one page the names of his six family members.

Georgia and Patterson Inman, 15-year-old twins, are the only living heirs to the $1 billion Duke tobacco fortune. They are also emotional wrecks, tortured by a hellacious childhood in which they were raised by drug addicts and left to fend for themselves in mansions across the country.