On the meaning of an ancient practice: collecting seashells.

The rise of “natural” wines, and what happens next.

On Rudolph Giuliani and the enduring power of shamelessness.

On the end of Harvey Weinstein.

On the pioneering New Yorker cartoonist.

A dispatch from the World Clown Association Convention.

Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media.

Inside a Michelin-starred chef’s revolutionary quest to harvest rice from the sea.

At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.

“On a small scale, Titanic Thompson is an American legend. I say on a small scale, because an overpowering majority of the public has never heard of him. That is the way Titanic likes it. He is a professional gambler. He has sometimes been called the gambler’s gambler.”

The Nazis stole his family’s paintings, but Max Stern escaped and became one of Canada’s leading art dealers. Now, 20 after his death, he is changing the rules of restitution.

“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.

Fifty years after Joseph Mitchell published “Joe Gould’s Secret” in The New Yorker, one last question about Gould—the identity of his anonymous benefactor—is answered.

On the strange ethics of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy:

What matters instead is the division of the world into good and evil, a division that begins with splitting sex into positive and negative experiences, then ripples out from that in fascinating ways.

A polygamist clan descended from four original families, the Order are believed to run the largest organized crime operation in Utah. When a chest full of gold disappeared, suspicion immediately fell on a group of boys who had split with the cult.

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.

How a bid to unseat Senator Thad Cochran led to an illegal photo in a nursing home, a flurry of arrests, and the death of the man who brought the Tea Party to Mississippi.

In 1952, Abe Feller, the U.N.’s first General Counsel, jumped to his death. More than 50 years later, his great nephew tries to figure out why.

How David Milch, the creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, blew his $100 million fortune at the track.

An attempt to make sense of the dog meat industry in Vietnam, an unregulated maze of black market slaughterhouses, home restaurants, and thieves who are often murdered in the open when caught stealing the family pet.

“‘It’s like a novel,’ a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said ‘incredible’ four times.”