The Christian organization Teen Challenge, made up of more than a thousand centers, claims to reform troubled teens. But is its discipline more like abuse?

In an old mine an hour north of Pittsburgh, 600 federal employees manage paperwork for the government’s retirement system. By hand. On paper. Without computers. The same exact way they always have.

The last vestiges of a sporting powerhouse.

They’re known as the Jills. They’re two of America’s top realtors, selling the glitziest mansions in Miami. Then a place went missing—and everyday greed blossomed into full-blown extortion.

The N.S.A. claims it needs access to all our phone records. But is that the best way to catch a terrorist?

Only 16 counties regularly impose death sentences, and they have three things in common: overaggressive prosecutors, defense lawyers who aren’t up to the task and cultural legacies of racial bias. Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit is among them.

After a final film, Kevin Smith is going to retire to a life of podcasting and speaking tours. Or so he says.

On Alison Winter’s Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, and issues of memory in the 20th century.

Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper.

There is no script for losing a spouse in your 30s.

In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for starting a fire that killed his three daughters. The case hinged on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Johnny E. Webb. Today, Webb says he lied.

Inside the ultra-Orthodox Jewish rally at Citi Field to discuss the dangers of the internet:

A man in a black fur hat asked him what, exactly, was an app, and he explained it to him. The man grimaced and walked away.

A profile of Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountain climber of all time.

Facing the inevitability of taking over care for someone who can’t take care of themselves.

What remains of the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

On the psychology of a rescue worker after years of responding to disaster.

On having sex with your high school girlfriend – and paying the price for years to come.

Karen Holloman opened the door of her uncle's apartment with his best friend, Larry Young, a step behind. As they edged inside, she looked to her left and saw the end of her uncle's bed and his motionless feet. "He's been in here asleep all along," Holloman muttered, for a moment annoyed at the worry he had caused by not answering his phone. Her anger froze as she entered his room: The Rev. Marvin Moore lay dead in his bed, a bullet hole through the back of his head, a pool of blood gathered beneath his limp arm.

She is venerated around the world. She has outlasted 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and order. But her kingdom is in turmoil, and her subjects are in denial that her reign will ever end. That’s why the palace has a plan.

How Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, all nine-sixteenths of a second of it, changed TV, the internet, and American culture.

The central witness in “one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history” speaks out.

How Dennis from Head of the Class grew up to be the Aaron Sorkin of tween television.

The enigmatic life and death of Bruno Zehnder, who obsessively photographed penguins in the ice fields outside of a Russian base in Antarctica.