The shooting of a civilian exposes the underbelly of a small town police department.

A history.

 The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity.

The evolution of cheating in chess.

“As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late.”

Cycles of boom and bust in the drilling town of Williston, N.D., as seen from the perspective of an itinerant dancer filling one of three slots at the only strip club in town, Whispers.

In defense of snark.

The tormenting of Wen Ho Lee.

The allure of invisibility.

How the actor ended up with a house full of tourniquets and syringes, an unflinching belief in the restorative powers of “ozone,” and the brain scan of someone who has “experienced the equivalent of blunt trauma.”

Confessions of a presidential campaign reporter.

The rise and fall of the Seven-Seven - stationed in the war zone of 1980’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn - and how an idealistic young recruit became part of cash-snatching, drug-reselling, renegade clique of cops

On the Dancing Dolls of Jackson, stars of the reality show Bring It! and part of a long Southern tradition of majorette dancing.

Real-estate mogul Charles Kushner had been cast out of power, found guilty of a strange bundle of crimes including “secretly setting up [his brother-in-law] with a prostitute, then taping the encounter.” His son Jared, then 23, was left to carry the ambition for the both of them.

The end of a marriage.

An oral history of Burning Man.

Two American backpackers, two Indonesian villagers, one small boat, 15 slices of bread, a dozen hard-boiled eggs, ten oranges, five apples, two pineapples, two bags of cookies, two packages of peanuts, eight liters of water, one machete and three weeks adrift at sea.

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

A profile of Steve Bannon — former naval officer and Goldman Sachs banker, executive chairman of Breitbart News, founding chairman of the Government Accountability Institute, and, as of yesterday, Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist.

A profile of Tom Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the sixth-highest paid lobbyist in the country. Since Obama took office, Donohue has scared-up tens of millions in new donations.

A profile of Jimmy Breslin.

“This isn’t an essay about clothes, exactly, nor is it about fashion, quite. It is about women and clothes and something that happens between them that we could think of as a kind of third rail of female experience.”

After the horror of ISIS captivity, tens of thousands of Iraqis—many of them children—are caught up in a mental-health crisis unlike any in the world.

The Mews, a father-son team of orthodontists, have an unusual theory about the source of crooked teeth — one that has earned them a following in some of the darker corners of the internet.

The soul of an octopus.