A new kind of late capitalism.

The many identities of Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace’s murderer.

The making of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2.

The career of Elton John.

The parallel lives of a KGB defector and his CIA handler.

The inside story of a Texas gun-smuggling ring.

On the rescue in July of two children from a burning apartment in southern France.

A profile of the youngest Black woman in Congress.

How a 26-year-old cocktail waitress ended up running a private weekly poker game for some of Hollywood’s highest rollers.

“Since 1932, the Gulf of Mexico has swallowed 2,300 square miles of the state’s wetlands, an area larger than Delaware. If no action is taken, the missing Delaware will become a missing Connecticut, and then a missing Vermont.”

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.

An essay on Alcor – “the Arizona cryonics company that has put the body of Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams in cryogenic suspension, in the hope he may one day rise again” – and the desire to live forever.

On 21st-century prospectors:

Shawn Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear.

Murderous editors, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more than $21 million on the line—the crazy alt-weekly war in San Francisco has it all.

Every year eleven million people attend Magh Mela, a Hindu festival on the banks of the Ganges. The temporary infrastructure to support them includes hospitals and power stations, plus a massive surveillance apparatus.

The first five years of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s tenure have been marked by a dangerous consolidation of power.

According to political allies and Western diplomats who have worked with Maliki, he isn't so much power-hungry as deeply cynical and mistrusting. The Dawa Party, which Maliki joined as a young man, was hunted by Saddam's Baathist regime. Even those living in exile -- like Maliki, who lived in Syria and Iran for more than 20 years -- organized themselves into isolated cells to protect against the regime's spies and limit the information that any one member might divulge if he were captured or compromised. Maliki's early career was saturated in perpetual suspicion.

Conspiracy theorists think that the government killed the aspiring Libertarian filmmaker David Crowley to stop him from making his film about an authoritarian takeover of the United States and the vets who fight back. The truth is far stranger.

Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation’s wealthiest people. It never had a chance.

The evolution and economics of English football.

A profile of the publisher of Screw, who died this week.

On the rise in gay teens who are cast out by their families.

The story behind “the best brisket you’ll ever eat.”

Heartbreak and heroics at the World Ploughing Championships

The long fight against racism in romance novels.