The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

How crooked officials pulled off a massive scam, spent millions on Dubai real estate, and killed the author’s law partner when he tried to expose them.

On returning to Lagos after years abroad.

It is always understood when you leave Nigeria as a Nigerian that you will return at some point.

In pre-modern poetry, Shakespeare, who mentioned everything, would probably have name checked products if he could, but there were few goods with the maker’s name on them: though he would specify the street or town which had given origin to a certain cut of sleeve.

David Headley helped plot the Mumbai terror attacks. Now his best friend is on trial for conspiring with him. The prosecution’s key witness: David Headley. The story of an informant trying to save his own life from the witness stand.

A profile of Vogue Creative Director André Leon Talley.

From our guide to haute couture genius at Slate.

HEMINGWAY: You go to the races? PLIMPTON: Yes, occasionally. HEMINGWAY: Then you read the Racing Form . . . . There you have the true art of fiction.

One student’s struggle, and the lawsuit that could put an end to a controversial “neutrality policy” in the Minnesota school district.

The body of a 38-year-old woman lay on her couch with the TV continuously running BBC for three years. Who was she, and why did it take three years for her to be discovered?

The inside story of the coup that has brought the world’s most feared terrorist network to the brink of collapse.

How a traveling medical technician managed to steal narcotics from hospitals, infecting at least 45 people with hepatitis C in the process.

On the magic of mother’s milk, which changes daily to meet the baby’s needs and can even start fighting an infection before anyone knows the kid is sick.

The police told Lara McLeod to report her rape. Then they arrested her for lying.

The city of Cleveland is on the hook $18.7 million in judgements for police brutality. They have a plan to get out of paying. And if it works, cities across the country could starting using the same maneuver.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy working for British intelligence, was poisoned. As he lay dying, he worked with detectives to find his killer.

“At 54, after 30 years of marriage and two of loneliness, I went online to find a man and found Dean.”

A three-part essay on love, loss, and what comes in between.

An attempt to figure out why, and how, a young pilot named Andreas Günter Lubitz deliberately plunged an airliner into the remote French Alps, killing himself and the other 149 people on board.

When he disappeared four years ago on Turkey’s tallest mountain, Donald Mackenzie wasn’t trying to reach the summit. A true believer, Mackenzie was looking for Noah’s Ark.

Every time a bicyclist rides on an open road, we entrust their lives to a safety net of legal protection and basic human decency. That system has failed.

Eight of serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s victims remained a mystery, 35 years after his conviction. One man made it his mission to identify them.

The dramatic liberties a much-heralded film takes with historical fact show how hard it is to get complexity onto the big screen.

Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.

The CNN anchor may not be the clueless bumbler the internet believes him to be.

“We still have retrograde ideas about how pregnant women should feel, and we need to revise them — not only for depressed women but for all women.”

A trip to the writers’ room of The Onion spinoff, which started as a BuzzFeed parody but has morphed into something else: “the institutional voice of the Internet.”