A prescient take on what the US invasion of Iraq would mean for both countries.

A Supreme Court Justice revisits a rape trial from the 1950s.

A friendship born of mutual interest in birding stretches across the Berlin Wall.

“I laugh off 90 percent of the stuff I’m sent,” Wu says. “But it’s the 10 percent.”

On the day of the earthquake, two men went into Haiti’s Soccer Federation headquarters. Only one came out.

In the throes of an epidemic, researchers investigate how to inoculate against the disease.

Thousands of internal documents help explain how, through brutality and bureaucracy, the Islamic State stayed in power for so long.

At Inhotim, Bernardo Paz commissioned the Jurassic Park of contemporary art. Then the Brazilian government started investigating him.

At the height of the Cold War, America’s most secretive counterespionage effort set out to crack unbreakable ciphers.

On the ethics of putting the internet’s spotlight on a neighborhood restaurant.

Karl Friston’s free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

A profile of the woman who wants to declutter the world.

An interview with Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution.

The passengers of the Diamond Princess came for indulgence, relaxation and bottomless buffets. Then they found themselves trapped on a ship infected with a deadly virus.

On the public-health risks of the American prison system.

Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.

The Texas Department of Transportation intends to spend $25 billion widening highways to fix traffic in Texas cities. What if we tore them down instead?

An excerpt from Darnielle’s debut novel, in which a disfigured man talks to maladjusted teens.

Perpetually reinvented through experimental chemistry, manufactured in Asian mills, packaged in foil with names like White Slut Concentrated and Charley Sheene for use as “hookah cleaner,” distributed in college town head shops, snorted and injected by hardened addicts and high school thrill seekers alike, bath salts may be the strangest and most volatile American drug craze since crack. And they’re (quasi) legal.

Pimp, brawler, Old Master.

Why the second Indiana Jones was so dark.

A glimpse into the overcrowded California State Prison, Los Angeles County.

When a writer’s daily routine gets out of control.

One morning, as I gobbled my doughnut and slurped my coffee, thinking to myself, "What a fantastic doughnut, what an amazing coffee," I realised that I had not just thought this but was actually saying aloud, "What a fantastic doughnut! What a totally fantastic experience!", and that this was attracting the attention of the other customers, one of whom turned to me and said, "You like the doughnuts, huh?"