In the basement of the White House, in an office with no windows, an MFA grad named Ben Rhodes is telling the story of America’s foreign policy.

It’s been 46 years since she gave her famous commencement address at Wellesley. What she was trying to say then—that politics is personal, that she believes in human connection above all else—she is trying to say again in 2016. Maybe she’s been trying to say it all along.

In 1980, four American nuns were murdered in El Salvador. This is the story of how a young American official stationed there singlehandedly found the culprits.

Excerpted from Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.

She is venerated around the world. She has outlasted 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and order. But her kingdom is in turmoil, and her subjects are in denial that her reign will ever end. That’s why the palace has a plan.

A Venezuelan cop who had previously starred in an action movie stole a helicopter and fired on the Supreme Court. He became a rebel folk hero, moving amongst safe houses with a small band of followers, until he was killed in a shoot-out that he broadcast live on Instagram.

On the nature of violence.

When my brother was twelve, I found six mice nailed to the wall of the abandoned tree house in the woods near our apartment. He spent a lot of time there. It seemed to me the little mouse faces were frozen in agony. As though they’d been alive when he’d hammered the nails through them.

“I was never falling-down drunk. I was never belligerent. I always got my work done. I was never unkempt. I was always clean, I was always shaved, I always performed at work. I was always kind and gracious in the dining room. But I lived in hell.”

A dispatch from Vermont, which is in the midst of what the governor calls a “full-blown heroin crisis.”

Two men, separated by more than 150 years, discover the folly of attempting Western-style capitalism in Micronesia.

In northern Nigeria, radical Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is facing a vigilante backlash from armed teenagers with nothing to lose.

A Little League season in Camden, New Jersey, where the murder rate is 17 times the national average.

Tom Cruise did not, in fact, jump up and down on Oprah’s couch.

The gangs of Brooklyn’s Brownsville, an area with the higest concentration of public housing in America.

A profile of anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who has spent her career uncovering a hidden global market in human flesh.

A 21-year-old UCLA math major leaves his $9,000-a-month internship to fight with the rebels in Libya.

In the Swiss town of Meiringen, where an obsessed group of ‘pilgrims’ painstakingly recreate the death of Sherlock Holmes.

A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events.

In 1968, the author revisits remote British Columbia, which he traveled two years earlier.

Is Bryan Saunders a drug-inspired outsider genius, or just in need of intervention?

A visit to the hotel North Korea starved to build, still unfinished after breaking ground in 1987.

On the actors who unwittingly starred in The Innocence of Muslims.

An internet pioneer loses hope in the promise of web culture.

Searching for answers 40 years after a Brooklyn man threw acid in the face of his 4-year-old neighbor.

On Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, its uncanny knack for reflecting changes in Russian politics and culture, and the recent acid attack on its artistic director.