The Constitution and its worshippers.

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.

“Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.’ And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.”

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

Over the past five years, the Syrian government has killed almost 700 medical personnel. Inside the race to spread medical knowledge as the Assad regime erases it.

How an obscure Australian judge and a hard-charging lawyer put the S&P on trial for the global financial collapse.

The search for the missing Holocaust hero began in 1945. The unending quest tore his family apart.

Searching for (and easily finding) Mark Augustus Landis, the man behind the “longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known.”

David Boies argued Bush v. Gore all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost the case, but in the process gained another client: Harvey Weinstein.

The rare Chilean soapbark tree produces compounds that can boost the body’s reaction to vaccines.

Making bio-diesel is hard. Getting paid $100 million to not make it is surprisingly easy.

During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word “pioneer”. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read: “Warning, you are being watched and recorded.” When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighbourhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This neighbourhood, he told me, needs “more people like you”. He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up”.

Excerpted from Notes From No Man’s Land

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

How a town of 4,000, defined by aviation catastrophe, produced three Olympic medallists.

Florida’s tourism economy crashed, leaving dozens of low-wage workers trapped in a crumbling motel without electricity.

Growth has slowed to a trickle in parts of Manchuria—but some young people are finding new careers online.

Uncovered letters reveal ties between the literary magazine and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The author investigates the massive wildlife die-off in the Salton Sea by rafting from its tributaries in Mexico.

After a murder in the California wilderness, the search for the killer raises complicated questions about mental illness.

The U.S. buried nuclear waste in the Pacific after WWII. It’s close to resurfacing.

What it means to be an entrepreneur in Argentina, where economic crashes are a way of life.