Since she first started working in the hospitality industry two decades ago, Vida Afram has cleaned nearly 60,000 hotel rooms.

As a right-wing terrorist cell went on a seven-year killing spree, did authorities look the other way?

“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.”

Harland Sanders left home when he was 13. He once gunned a man down in the street for painting over one of his signs. During the war, he fed the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And then, in his 60s and going by the moniker Colonel Sanders, he began selling fried chicken.

“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.”

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.

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.

A profile of Moktar Belmoktar, Al-Qaida’s “most difficult employee,” who was responsible for a major attack on an Algerian BP plant and, according to U.S. and Libyan forces, was killed in an air strike on Sunday.

How living off food stamps is making South Texans obese but leaving them hungry.

On the insurer’s insurer and calculating the risk of modern catastrophe:

Reinsurers are ultimately responsible for every new thing that God can come up with. As losses grew this decade, year by year, reinsurers have been working to figure out what they can do to make the God clause smaller, to reduce their exposure. They have billions of dollars at stake. They are very good at thinking about the world to come.

For the past 16 months, he had worked as a mole, posing as a militant jihadist in the Islamic State while passing critical information to a secret branch of Iraq’s national intelligence agency. His record was stunning: He had foiled 30 planned vehicle-bomb attacks and 18 suicide bombers, according to Abu Ali al-Basri, the agency’s director. Captain Sudani also gave the agency a direct line to some of the Islamic State’s senior commanders in Mosul.

A profile of Claire Danes.

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.

“Everyone on the boat is racist and nice. Including me.”

How good is Julian Newman, really?

What it means when an investigative reporter’s undercover work is framed as a personal journey.

A dispatch from Cape Town, where surprising things can happen when it feels like the world is about to end.

Is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions existential threat, a last resort, or both?

A report from Antartica, where the ecosystem is changing so fast scientists have no idea what will come next.