Clay Shirky, writing in 1999 on the Web eclipsing TV’s reach: “We will always have massive media, but the days of mass media are over, killed by the explosion of possibility and torn into a thousand niches.”

The first attempt at a behind-the-scenes narrative of LeBron James joining Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade on the Heat, a plan which had apparently been in the works since 2006.

Tony Judt on his own amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the experience of being “left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.”

For 60 years, the weekly Evening Whirl attacked the drug lords, whoring preachers, and hypocritical bourgeoisie of St. Louis’ black community, sometimes in rhyming Iambic couplets.

A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.

When ‘Ceca’, the Madonna of the Balkans, met Arkan, bank robber turned paramilitary leader and war criminal, and how it all came to a tragic end in the lobby of the Belgrade Intercontinental.

A single-page version of Shalhoup’s reporting on the Black Mafia Family, one of the largest cocaine empires in American history.

The prosecutor in the case of hacker turned F.B.I. informant (but still hacker) Albert Gonzales and his organization Shadowcrew : “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

A survey on where the industry is headed. Says one agency veteran: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”

Nobody knows the full story of why legendary surfer Andy Irons died in a Dallas hotel room earlier this month. But some who knew him have come forward to discuss the demons he’d battled for years.

“Why are you putting all that muddle in your brain that’s not needed to be there?”

An interview about why giving interviews is totally worthless.

Anatomy of an international incident; how three idealistic young American hikers wandered across the Kurdistan-Iran border and ended up in Iranian prison charged with spying.

Nobody loved chimpanzees more than St. James Davis and his wife LaDonna; the couple spent more than 30 years—and gained a modicum of fame—raising one as their son. Then they almost died in a brutal chimp attack.

How a nation went bankrupt. “Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place.”

The father: an Oscar-winning songwriter. The son, a college dropout and partier around downtown New York. Their alleged crimes; serial casting-couch rape (the senior) and a drowning murder in a Soho House bathtub (the junior).

In 1998, a reporter called up Thompson to discuss the Clinton scandal and film adaptations, among other topics. The complete, previously unpublished transcript of their conversation.

A suitcase was smuggled from Spain to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War containing negatives from three photographers would later become legends and all die in war zones. The suitcase disappeared.

A young, shackled black man is shot to death — and the police say he killed himself. The resulting investigation has pitted the victim’s father against the most powerful man in New Iberia, La.

He was the most powerful fish broker in New Bedford, America’s most valuable seafood port. The Russians who arrived looking to buy his operation were undercover agents and he told them everything.

An essay on clothing in uncertain times.

“My stories, my family’s stories, were not stories in India. They were just life.”

When Isis rounded up Yazidi women and girls in Iraq to use as slaves, the captives drew on their collective memory of past oppressions – and a powerful will to survive.

By the time Noura Jackson’s conviction was overturned, she had spent nine years in prison. This type of prosecutorial error is almost never punished.

On Amaka Osakwe and life as a woman in Lagos.

When she died in 1952, author Margaret Wise Brown left the rights to Goodnight Moon to a nine-year-old neighbor named Albert Clarke. The book became a classic. Clarke, living entirely off the royalties, became a deadbeat.