When Larycia Hawkins, the first black woman to receive tenure at Wheaton College, made a symbolic gesture of support for Muslims, the evangelical college became divided over what intellectual freedom on its campus really meant.

Franklin Leonard’s anonymous survey has launched careers, recognized four of the past eight Best Picture winners, and pushed movie studios to think beyond sequels and action flicks.

Life at Marvel Comics in the mid-1960s.

An excerpt from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

After watching his father Sandy abuse his paralyzed former-jockey mother for years, Mat Crichton committed murder. Nearly the entire local farming community rallied in support of him.

On Aint It Cool News’ Harry Knowles, who built an influential empire on insider movie news while wheelchair-bound and at one point weighing over 500 pounds, then lost it all.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.

An interview with the artchitects responsible for Stuttgart’s train station, Hamburg’s concert house and Berlin’s airport, three projects “currently competing to be seen as the country’s most disastrous.”

How a struggling comedian became a pimp who eventually started sending teenage hookers on bank robbery missions that earned them notoriety as the “Starlet Bandits.”

Cassie Chadwick pulled her first con in 1870, at the age of 13. Over the next 30 years, she would scam her way to $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.

An interview with Barry Diller about Aereo and the past, present and future of TV.

Previously: Vanessa Grigoriadis on the Longform Podcast.

Somaly Mam’s harrowing story of her own flight from sexual servitude and the stories of hundreds of girls she rescued from Cambodian brothels brought her fame and helped raise millions for her non-profit. Does it matter if none or few of the stories are true?

How divisions between Nigeria’s Muslim North and Christian South resulted in the birth of terror’s most ruthless movement.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with limits on abortion. Activists like Rebecca Gompert imagine a future where those limits are meaningless because most abortions happen at home.

Jamie Smith said he was a co-founder of Blackwater and a former CIA officer. He appeared on cable news as a counterterrorism expert and he received millions in goverment contracts to train personnel. The money was real. The resume wasn’t.

“The idea for Handybook occurred to me when I was studying at Harvard. It was so hard to find a reliable cleaning service to tidy my apartment! You know?”

Christopher Catambrone wants to help illegal migrants who try to cross the Mediterranean in ill-equipped, unsafe boats. But it’s hard to do alone.

Why are so many teenagers killing themselves in Palo Alto?

Since the Syrian rebel leader Hassan Aboud joined ISIS, taking with him fighters and weapons, he has been behind a sprawling mix of battlefield action and crime.

An ex-SEAL turns to “ocean therapy” to cope with chronic pain and PTSD.

On Forever 21 and the rise of “fast fashion”:

They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly.

On September 11, 2001, three out of every four people who worked for Howard Lutnick died. The story of a recovery.