As U.S. troops departed, Baghdad in ruins.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. While on assignment for the New York Times, Anthony Shadid died today in Syria.

The hidden history of poker and crypto.

A profile of Toni Morrison.

In 1966, Anton LaVey introduced the world to the Church of Satan. The 1980s saw a “Satanic Panic” in the form of abuse charges brought against child-care workers and suburban parents. Today, the author joins a group of Satanists for afternoon tea at the church’s global headquarters in a “bland New York college town.”

The dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers.

How child molesters get away with it.

On a 1955 ferris wheel accident.

When the Champ met Castro.

The legacy of Benihana.

A healthcare nightmare.

An essay on insomnia.

An argument for working less.

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.

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.

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.