Cancer, poverty, and a reporter taking care of her source.

A novelist’s memoir of depression, whose “intrinsic malevolence” as a disease brought him close to suicide.

Booze, sex, and the dark art of dealmaking in China.

The great director always refused to get liposuction.

A reversal of power in an age-old partnership.

The flawed science that helped convict a Tennessee man of murder.

The strange situation of Huntsville, Texas.

The complicated class politics of American eating habits.

Inside the world of “Wooks,” the loner-craftsmen behind the coming marijuana-concentrate boom.

On the evolution of the Whitney Museum.

The inner workings of a surprisingly amiable Holocaust denial conference.

Are video games capable of emotion?

A day in the political life of Barack Obama.

The unsolved killing of Russia’s most notorious spammer.

The rise and fall of Suck.com, the web’s first daily-updated site.

A pair of undercover cops infiltrate a dogfighting ring in Houston.

The story of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, written and published the following week.

A globe-trotting, pre-CCTV profile of architect Rem Koolhaas.

An archaeology of debt.

A primer on Egypt’s political landscape.

What the twentieth century history of rocketry can tell us about innovation.

Cathie Black, former magazine executive, currently Bloomberg’s hand-picked Chancellor of New York City schools

First-person accounts from the 2004 siege of a Russian school in Beslan by Chechen terrorists.

“Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.”

How the overdiagnosis of disease makes for unnecessary treatment, high anxiety, and ballooning costs.