The taming of the political reporter.

Survivors of the real ‘Central Park Five’ attacker speak for the first time.

How $100 million in cuts created chaos in Florida’s mental hospitals.

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.

A refugee survives the Rwandan genocide and finds a future in Atlanta.

“What happens when the thing that might save you is also the thing that might destroy the world?”

“The Farsi Island mission was a gross failure, involving issues that have plagued the Navy in recent years: inadequate training, poor leadership, and a disinclination to heed the warnings of its men and women about the true extent of its vulnerabilities.”

“Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier’s son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.”

A few months after working at Ground Zero, Kurt Sonnenfeld became a suspect in the mysterious and high-profile death of his wife. He got off, barely, and started a new life in South America. But when the U.S. tried to bring him back to face charges, Sonnenfeld went to the local media. The Feds didn’t want him for murder, he said. They wanted to put him away because of what he knew about 9/11.

Twenty-five years after her career-making album, Liz Phair is still writing songs first and foremost for herself.

From legal battles to securing vendors to getting the walls painted, every budget line is a struggle.

In 1980 a convicted con-man named Melvin Weinberg was sent by the FBI to offers bribes to U.S. Congressmen on behalf of a phony Arab sheik. The Abscam, short for ‘Abdul Scam’, sting brought down for several representatives, but longtime politician John Murtha narrowly avoided offering a bribe on camera.

Nearing the end of his career, a Canadian tycoon named Michael DeGroote went for one last deal, investing $100 million to build a Las Vegas in the Dominican Republic. His partners? Two brothers with a criminal past, a con man and an old friend with close ties to the mob.

The intricate dance between highly organized ultras fan organizations, the teams they support, and the mafia for control of the center of curva and the lucrative ticket-touting opportunities that come with it.

How a creator of Assassin’s Creed sold investors on a magic marijuana product that he claimed could predictably produce specific feelings in users.

Traveling the highway that could make Brazil an economic powerhouse — at the expense of the Amazon.

How the government enabled the one percent to capitalize on the housing crisis.

A patriotic parade, a bloody brawl, and the origins of U.S. law enforcement’s war on the political left.

“It’s Tuesday, it’s February, it’s my first day back at work after a week on vacation. I notice the candle in the foyer just as the whoosh of the door blows it out. They never did that for my birthday, I think as I walk past reception.”

After circulating Lolita in secret amongst a small circle of New Yorker editors and publishers, Vladamir Nabokov finally placed it at Olympia Press. Three weeks before publication, a slumping and broke Dorothy Parker appeared in The New Yorker with a story entitled “Lolita” about a teenage bride, her jealous mother, and a much older man.

If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.

On a week spent immersed in right wing media.

A journalist goes undercover in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum.

In 1982, a family disappeared from their Los Angeles home. A writer and former neighbor is still trying to put the pieces together.

Malfunctions caused two deadly crashes. But an industry that puts unprepared pilots in the cockpit is just as guilty.