Manson at 79: in poor health and walking with a cane, obsessed with Vincent Bugliosi, willing to talk at length with a reporter for the first time in years, and visited every weekend by a 25-year-old woman he calls Star.

The Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman star on being married to Woody Allen, Jewish words, and Girls.

The rise and fall of the new oligarchs, who raided the Russian state. When Putin came to power most fled, but not Mikhail Khodorkovsky: “The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.”

Passengers get a free ride. Drivers get a passport to the HOV lane. Nobody pays, nobody talks. On “slugging,” the DIY commuter system in D.C. that’s being used by 10,000 people a day and taking thousands of cars off the road.

What overcrowded and swelling Bangladesh can tell us about how the planet’s population, more than 1/3 of which live within 62 miles of a shoreline, will react to rising sea levels.

The discovery of 30,000-year old, perfectly preserved cave paintings in southern France offer a glimpse into a world that 21st-century humans can never hope to understand. The article that inspired Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

Speaking to a group that started their college lives in September, 2001, the host of The Daily Show embraces how difficult the real world is:

I want to address is the idea that somehow this new generation is not as prepared for the sacrifice and the tenacity that will be needed in the difficult times ahead. I have not found this generation to be cynical or apathetic or selfish. They are as strong and as decent as any people that I have met. And I will say this, on my way down here I stopped at Bethesda Naval, and when you talk to the young kids that are there that have just been back from Iraq and Afghanistan, you don’t have the worry about the future that you hear from so many that are not a part of this generation but judging it from above.

A trip to the Cannabis Cup serves as a backdrop for the story of how the War on Drugs revolutionized the way marijuana is cultivated in America.

How a musical subculture evolved alongside a technological subculture:

Rave's rise mirrors the Web's in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward "free spaces" with special appeal to geeks and wonks.

How the spirit became a billion-dollar business.

Michael Roper, owner of Chicago’s Hopleaf bar and restaurant, recalls what bartending was like in the early seventies. While Smirnoff was considered top shelf, he remembers lesser varieties such as Nikolai, Arrow, Wolfschmidt, and another brand that was then ubiquitous called Mohawk. “Mohawk was cheap, cheap, cheap,” Roper remembers. “Mohawk had a factory just outside Detroit along the expressway and .  .  . all their products were made there. It’s almost like they turned a switch—whiskey, vodka, gin. And it was all junk.” Still, by 1976, vodka had surpassed bourbon and whiskey as the most popular spirit in America. Roper attributes vodka’s rise partially to women, who started drinking more spirits and ordering them on their own: “Women were not going to like Scotch—that was for cigar-smoking burly men,” he speculates. “And .  .  . it was unladylike to drink Kentucky whiskey. But it was considered somewhat ladylike to have a fancy cocktail with an olive in it.” He also remembers when a salesman first brought Miller Lite into his bar, explaining “it’s for women.” In a similar vein, Roper considers vodka a low-calorie option with “a less challenging flavor.”

Inside the lives of students at an elite Beijing high school in the months leading up to gaokao, literally “high test,” the national university admittance exam.

On the London riot on 2011, which “tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out.”

In the first seven months of 2011, 94,000 people were sued for illegally downloading porn. Not one case has been decided by a jury. On the industry’s new strategy to make downloaders pay.

From the Econo-Lodge to the Porcupine Freedom Festival, on the campaign trail with former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, the fringe candidate who doesn’t really seem he should be a fringe candidate.

Al Sharpton wanted to be a civil rights leader in the mold of Martin Luther King, Jr. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

In the age of citizen journalism, smartphones and streaming video, bearing witness to human rights violations is getting easier. Is it also making justice more complicated?

“When I was a child, Dad told me that he chose to become a cop because a cop was the most respected man on the block. When I took a seat at the grown folks table, he told me that he wanted control.”

On Elena Ferrante:

Different names, every time, but the reaction is the same: a momentary light in the listener’s eyes that fades to bored disappointment. An Italian woman from Naples, whose name you wouldn’t know. Who did you expect?

The woman that the mixed martial arts star beat nearly to death tells her side of the story.

As a teenage sales clerk, Monica Prata noticed that men were coming into stores with an interest in women’s clothing and makeup. So she decided to become a “feminine image consultant.”

I’ve read stories from people who say they always knew they were attracted to the same sex, or that they figured it out at a young age. I’m not one of them.

Hanging out in Moscow with Russia’s yuppie, 20-something journalist revolutionaries:

In other words, the protest was being brought to you by the same people you would have relied on, weeks earlier, for restaurant picks.