An investigation of the American sex trafficking industry.

A profile of GOP hopeful Jon Huntsman.

A search for the “armpit of America” ends in Battle Mountain, Nevada.

The behind-the-scenes publishing saga of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel.

Inside the twisted, litigious world of software patents.

On why routinizing space travel has failed.

A footnoted inquiry into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.

A profile of Barry Bonds published as the steroid talk intensified.

An oral history of the soap opera.

On witnessing the transformation of George W. Bush over 25 years.

On cell phones and the decline of public space.

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I'm still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw--this is just the way life is now.

On Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and the genesis of the Kindle.

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

On the brutal killing of a high school girl in British Columbia.

The rewards and pitfalls of selling haunted objects.

The death of an infant lands his father on death row in Louisiana.

The lives of six people who survived the atomic bomb.

“Super tunnels” are a speciality of the Sinaloa drug cartel – and its leader, El Chapo.

Hanging out with one of America’s most hated pundits.

On the 1915 hanging of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia.

The three men vying to be the next publisher of the New York Times.

An oral history of Gucci Mane’s many rises and falls.

A moment of racism at Harvard leads the writer to consider Huckleberry Finn.

On the wives of whalers and their dildos.

A profile of Henry Hook, the world’s best crossword puzzler, who died this week.