How the USPS works.

Machine guns, cannons and drones in the Arizona desert.

How feverish selling and infighting built the buzziest artist of 2020.

Inside the tech industry’s decades-long failure to reckon with risk.

A profile of Alex Trebek.

A couple, a caregiver, and a promise.

A 32-year-old medical student finally goes on the record.

It’s not just the economy, stupid.

How a police organization transitioned from a social club to an obstacle to reform.

A dispatch from the pandemic under Governor Kristi Noem.

What lasting impact will the pandemic have on America’s first responders?

Daniel Hale exposed the machinery of America’s clandestine warfare. Why did no one seem to care?

On Manson bloggers, murder fandom and being a sad, dark teen.

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

An attempt to sort out whether Vick is truly a changed man or simply a very gifted football player who was bound to be forgiven.

“I took my son to Paris fashion week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants.”

Jeff Walton is a 69-year-old plumber with a wife and 35-year-old son. It turns out he’s also Ronald Stan, a Canadian man who faked his own death in 1977.

Margaritaville, as Parrotheads will tell you, is a state of mind. But it’s also—delightfully, sometimes inexplicably—a real place now open in Times Square.

The aftermath of a revolution:

Amid all the chaos of Libya’s transition from war to peace, one remarkable theme stood out: the relative absence of revenge. Despite the atrocities carried out by Qaddafi’s forces in the final months and even days, I heard very few reports of retaliatory killings. Once, as I watched a wounded Qaddafi soldier being brought into a hospital on a gurney, a rebel walked past and smacked him on the head. Instantly, the rebel standing next to me apologized. My Libyan fixer told me in late August that he had found the man who tortured him in prison a few weeks earlier. The torturer was now himself in a rebel prison. “I gave him a coffee and a cigarette,” he said. “We have all seen what happened in Iraq.” That restraint was easy to admire.

“The squirrels may take my tomatoes and spit them back, but they would not go unanswered. The time had come to close the circle of life.”

She lives in a world called Calalini with an invisible companion named 400-the-Cat; inside the life of a six-year-old with schizophrenia.

In early 2012, the bones of a woman and young boy were found near the Arizona-Mexico border. The author investigates who they were and how they died.

How Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, with a little help from the Bush Administration, got 140 trees chopped down in a national park to improve his view and ruined the life of a park ranger in the process.

The 20 soldiers in Second Platoon try in vain to hold down a strategic outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, “among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces.”