How coach Jurgen Klinsmann, “soccer’s Alexis de Tocqueville,” is trying to give the US an identity.

After a 19-year-old is convicted of murdering his girlfriend, her family fights to free him from prison.

On internships at Disney World, where “labor is meant to have an almost invisible quality.”

On the lifestyle of a fugitive retiree, and how it came to an end.

How LA-style gang life migrated to the slums of San Salvador.

Kevin Wheatcroft owns the world’s largest collection of Nazi memorabilia. And he’s suddenly eager to show it off.

To understand the state’s urban-rural divide, start by looking at Yamhill County’s proposed walking trail.

When jobs vanish, Southern men find new ways to contribute.

A dispatch from Eloise Woods, a natural burial ground where bodies are consigned directly to the earth.

Immune systems don’t make for clean narratives, even as we expect them to keep us pure.

It’s quite possible to make six figures standing around on a movie set – if you have a union card.

Before embarking on dangerous rock climbs, Matt Samet would use whiskey to wash down powerful prescription tranquilizers. A first-person account of extreme addiction.

Kids are identifying as gay at younger ages, sometimes only 10 or 11. Their communities and parents are scrambling to adapt.

How the mind behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto plans to push gaming further.

A trip to Râmnicu Vâlcea, a town of 120,000 where the primary (and lucrative) industry is Internet scams.

Is the genetically engineered chestnut tree an act of ecological restoration or a threat to wild forests?

She tore up a picture of the pope. Then her life came apart. These days, she just wants to make music.

A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

On the current state of the global economy and the inevitable decline of the U.K. and the U.S.:

A decade-long slowdown would accelerate this shift in global wealth and power and would be a grim thing to live through, but from a world-historical perspective it might not be a game-changer: it might just be the non-scenic route to the place we’re going anyway.

Outkast’s Andre Benjamin at 42.

You gotta understand, I’ve only written one check in my life. When I was 17, they still had checkbooks, and my mom taught me how to write a check and do my balance. So I had one check on my balance, and then OutKast took off. I have not paid a bill since. People ask, What does it feel like? As humans, we want attention. We want to be validated. At the same time, it’s strange attention, and a lot of it. If you have an excess of anything, it becomes strange.

A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:

The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.

When Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison were roommates.

He and I had our differences. I am not inclined to be sentimental about those Arcadian or Utopian days. He didn't approve of my way of running the place. I had complained also that his dog relieved himself in my herb garden. I asked, "Can't you arrange to have him do his shitting elsewhere?"