Home-funeral guides believe that families can benefit from tending to—and spending time with—the bodies of their deceased.

Observers have long warned of rising forced labor in Xinjiang. Satellite images show factories built just steps away from cell blocks.

How did a lorry carrying 273 dead bodies end up stranded on the outskirts of Guadalajara?

just three months, we have seen Charlie and Tessy through a lifetime of crises — temporary sobriety, meth binges, two stints in jail, three moves, one eviction, several religious, end-of-the-world texts on our phones, a dozen different phones and phone numbers (meth addicts go through “Obama Phones” like packs of cigarettes), and a stay in a psychiatric hospital. Every day brings some kind of cruel surprise, some hardship that would pummel me, but is just business as usual for them.

The story of Tim Danielson, one of America’s top high school distance runners, who went on to murder his ex-wife.

Parking garages, prisons, freeways and the world of stuff we’re not supposed to look at.

On the reality TV empire of Thom Beers, creator of Deadliest Catch.

Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

A profile of Christopher Brosius, the “Willy Wonka of fragrances,” whose latest creation is designed to not be smelled.

David Simon and Richard Price, two of the greatest crime storytellers of our time, talk about their craft.

A story of endurance in the face of unimaginably brutal conditions.

A group of Long Island misfits with aspirations towards Satanic worship disappeared into the woods to take mescaline. One of them never came back.

Pitching a no-hitter in the middle of a multi-day acid bender was only one of Dock Ellis’ many amazing exploits.

Video-game designer Zoë Quinn in the aftermath of Gamergate, an act of web harassment with world-altering implications.

Billy Mitchell’s quest for video game perfection.

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.”

The Charleston Gazette-Mail, known for its dogged accountability journalism, survived a merger and bankruptcy. Will it survive a new owner with ties to the very industries its reporters have been watchdogging?

Tom Bissell was an acclaimed young writer when he started playing Grand Theft Auto. For the last three years he has been sleep deprived, cocaine fueled, and barely able to write a word—and he has no regrets.

Anytime the racial temperature goes up and hell pays a visit to earth, the disappointment takes a holiday. And you fight. You fight because you’re tired. Yet you’re tired because you’ve been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.