Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

On literary tourism:

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real.

As the hip-hop group Odd Future rose to fame, their sixteen-year-old breakout star Earl Sweatshirt mysteriously disappeared.

(After a stretch at a school in Samoa, he seems to have reappeared yesterday.)

Inside the ultra-Orthodox Jewish rally at Citi Field to discuss the dangers of the internet:

A man in a black fur hat asked him what, exactly, was an app, and he explained it to him. The man grimaced and walked away.

“I turned to see Eva padding around the room, naked, dipping a small plastic wand into the bottle of bubble soap she’d bought at the market… Sometime in the far future, when I was lying on my deathbed, I said, this was the moment I wanted to remember.”

On the relationship between travel and photography.

After two years of filming Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole returns to his childhood home in Ireland.

Plus: 50 years later, Gay Talese remembers the late Peter O'Toole.

Brooklyn, Illinois has one of the most dense clusters of strip clubs and rubdown parlors in the entire country, drawing patrons from nearby St. Louis and its suburbs. Inside the clubs with the dancers, a strip club scholar, the mayor, and the regulars whose dollars keep the depressed local economy afloat.

“Jeffrey Levitt stole and misappropriated a grand total of fourteen million, six hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred forty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents. He stole all that. It was the largest single white-collar crime in Maryland history, almost bringing down the state’s entire savings and loan industry.” And it still wasn’t enough.

Twelve years ago, a Saudi Arabian man, whom federal authorities had long suspected of having ties to terrorism, was sentenced to life in prison on multiple counts of unlawful sexual contact. To this day, al-Turki has maintained that he’s innocent and was instead the target of post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment.

The aforementioned “twist” is that while dinner is free for the black residents of the neighborhood, the prices for white visitors are listed on a pledge form at their seats: $100 for one piece of chicken; $1,000 for four pieces. For a whole bird, with sides, you must donate the deed to a property in North Nashville.

“This is the story of those 10 days, the new and relentless strain of gun violence in America, and the desperate need for us not to look away.”

In October 2006, a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?

In the years before World War II, Zacharewicz shined at Cannes and was wooed by Samuel Goldwyn but when the Nazis occupied Poland, he was sent to Auschwitz for defending his Jewish countrymen: “For him, the choice was easy.”

In November 1985, a woman who appeared to be a homeless drifter staked out the offices of 80-year-old banker Nicholas Deak, waited until he returned from lunch, then executed Deak and his secretary. As police wrestled her to the floor, she said “Don’t hurt me. He told me I could carry the gun.”

An indigenous leader reflects on a lifetime following the law of the land in Australia.

Yemen on the brink of hell:

In a sense, south Yemen itself offers a grim cautionary tale about the events now unfolding in Taiz and across the country. Until 1990, when the two Yemens merged, South Yemen was a beacon of development and order. Under the British, who ruled the south as a colony until 1967, and the Socialists, who ran it for two decades afterward, South Yemen had much higher literacy rates than the north. Child marriage and other degrading tribal practices came to an end; women entered the work force, and the full facial veil became a rarity. It was only after Ali Abdullah Saleh imposed his writ that things began to change. When the south dared to rebel against him in 1994, Saleh sent bands of jihadis to punish it. The north began treating the south like a slave state, expropriating vast plots of private and public land for northerners, along with the oil profits. Tribal practices returned. Violent jihadism began to grow.

If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a somber literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime -- if you should be so young and fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.