The rise and fall of Lou Pearlman; blimp impresario, packager of boy bands like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, molester, fraudster, and ultimately fugitive from justice.

Over four months, a methane well in southern California’s Aliso Canyon leaked Lebanon’s equivalent of yearly emissions into the atmosphere. No one knows what the long-term effects will be.

Shot and killed just shy of his 18th birthday, Deonte Hoard was one of 489 homicide victims in Chicago last year. How this happened—and how it keeps happening—is both one person’s story and the story of how a community has been forced to adjust to murder as an everyday fact of life.

The 66-year-old became lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail. She survived for at least 16 days before crawling into her sleeping bag one last time, her journal sealed in a waterproof bag.

When the battered body of a Cambridge Ph.D. student was found outside Cairo, Egyptian police claimed he had been hit by a car. Then they said he was the victim of a robbery. Then they blamed a conspiracy against Egypt. But in a digital age, it’s harder than ever to get away with murder.

A private contractor tossed U.S. military waste in Iraq and Afghanistan into giant pits and burned it. Now soldiers forced to breathe the toxic fumes are sick or dying—and the government is using faulty science to evade responsibility.

It started as simple teenage rebellion but ended up tearing Syria apart, setting in motion events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world. The boys behind the graffiti would become unlikely revolutionaries and reluctant refugees. Not all of them would survive the upheaval they helped unleash.

“When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.”

“From this day forward, Ken doesn’t always have to look like the most basic frat bro ever to get a B- in econ. He can be complicated, mysterious—maybe even vegan. No more Mr. Nice Ken. (Actually, he’ll still be very, very nice.)”

“Tiffany Haddish may, in fact, be too good at being Tiffany Haddish. Too good at seeming like one of your friends who became famous. At times, she treats her new fame like she is on a group text with the world.”

“My dad’s whole idea was to do an amusement park differently, not where you just got strapped in and twisted around, but one where you controlled what was going on. You can have an awesome time, but you can also hurt yourself if you don’t use good judgment.”

On a desolate, six-mile stretch of Indian beachfront, the bulk of the world’s big ships are dismantled for scrap. Though a ship is usually worth over $1 million in steel, the margins are low, the leftovers are toxic, and the labor—which employs huge numbers of India’s poor—is wildly dangerous.

Published across three consecutive issues and later adapted into the book (and mini-series) Generation Kill, the story of bullets, bombs and a Marine platoon at war in Iraq.

Clint Lorance had been in charge of his platoon for only three days when he ordered his men to kill three Afghans stopped on a dirt road. A second-degree murder conviction and pardon followed. Today, Lorance is hailed as a hero by President Trump. His troops have suffered a very different fate.

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.

“When I’ve had courage, I often lacked the healthy choices. When I’ve had healthy choices, I often lacked courage. Ending unhealthy transactional relationships and opening ourselves to radical possibilities is one way we effectively heal ourselves and others in America.”

When people ask what I like so much about being from the Midwest, I get to tell them: I know the architecture of the wind. I know the violence it blows in and out. I like to keep my survival as simple as I can.

For more than a decade, the employees of a Washington think tank were traumatized by an unlikely harasser: a career Foreign Service officer. In hundreds of emails and voicemails, he called them “Arab American terrorist murderers” and ranted about how they should be cleansed. Yet there was almost nothing they could do.

“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.”

Amidst a historic shortage at sperm banks nationwide, a new means of donation is on the rise: Facebook groups. Elaine Byrd got involved in the community first as a moderator, then as a recipient. That’s how she met Ari Nagel, aka the Sperminator, a superdonor with nearly a hundred biological children and counting.

In Afghanistan and other zones of international crisis with John Kerry:

Why, then, does Kerry bother? Why is he racing back and forth to put out the fires being set by a serial arsonist? I asked him about this on the short flight from Kabul to Islamabad. Kerry tried to put the best possible face on what he had learned. Despite the warlords in Kabul, he said, Karzai had appointed some talented officials at the provincial and district levels. “It’s a mixed bag,” he concluded gamely. Kerry knew Karzai’s failings as well as anyone, but he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan’s president, because he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan. But why not?

An essay on poetry and madness.

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else.

The failure of MTV’s Staten Island-based reality show and the fate of its cast members:

While Bridge & Tunnel hangs in programming purgatory, the DeBartolis are hamstrung by Draconian network contracts that reportedly don't allow them to have agents or managers or even talk about any of this publicly for five years. So while JWoww shills her own black bronzer line and Snooki slams into Italian police cars for $100,000 an episode, Gabriella and Brianna have been working respectively as a secretary and a pizza-order girl in Staten Island. The papers they signed as passports off Staten Island are effectively keeping them there.

Promise kept.

But his greatest presidential stumbling block may be right under his nose. At home, Newt's second wife, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, tells me she doesn't see herself in the First Lady's job. "Watching Hillary has just been a horrible experience," commiserates Marianne. "Hillary sticking her neck out is not working." What happens if Newt runs?, I ask. "He can't do it without me," she replies. "I told him if I'm not in agreement, fine, it's easy" --she giggles at her naughtiness. "I just go on the air the next day, and I undermine everything..."