The unlikely story of Spanx.

On distance running and the art of exhaustion.

Inside the cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.

America’s devastating treatment of schizophrenia.

The political history of Planned Parenthood.

A history of hoboes in America.

A profile of Eric Holder.

Mini-Currys and the future of basketball.

A profile of football coach Jon Gruden.

The hidden history of poker and crypto.

A profile of Toni Morrison.

A profile of André Leon Talley.

Earlier this month, while China's leaders were staging a grandiose celebration of their revolution's 40th birthday, thousands of somber Hong Kong residents gathered for a dreary commemoration of their own. Far from the fireworks display in Beijing, Hong Kongers huddled in a rainstorm near the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, singing patriotic songs and listening to mournful poems dedicated to those who died in Tiananmen Square.

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action... Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.

A profile of Zendaya.

“The dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal—the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.”

The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com.

The sewer hunters, or “toshers,” of 19th century London.

Knowing where to find the most valuable pieces of detritus was vital, and most toshers worked in gangs of three or four, led by a veteran who was frequently somewhere between 60 and 80 years old. These men knew the secret locations of the cracks that lay submerged beneath the surface of the sewer-waters, and it was there that cash frequently lodged.

A profile of Sophia Amoruso, the 30-year-old CEO of Nasty Gal and author of #GIRLBOSS.

“What kind of a person looks upon the world’s largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying ‘Wow!’ says something like ‘Where’s my gun?’”

The fall of billionaire Henry Nicholas, co-founder and CEO of microchip-maker Broadcom, who lost his job and his marriage amidst allegations of drug use, cooking the books, and building a secret party lair beneath the house he shared with family.

“The mythical image of Malick that has been built up over the last 30-odd years is, in essence, a creation of the same media corps with whom the filmmaker himself has continually chosen not to engage.”

An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”

Five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed on American soil between 1981 and 1990. The prime suspects? Members of the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, a group of former military commanders from South Vietnam.