On the unlikely friendship between Nelson Algren and the young writer during the final years of Algren’s life.

It was June of 1980 when Nelson called me breathlessly from the highway.

The 20-year-old is poised to burst into the top tier of women’s tennis. Can she also burst Japan’s expectations of what it means to be Japanese?

On the history of the Bund, an armed, socialist anti-Zionist group that was once the most popular Jewish party in Poland until they were murdered in the Holocaust.

Rodrigo Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder. The unraveling of a political conspiracy.

The world’s largest jewelry retailer was a cesspool of harassment and unfair treatment of women who worked there.

An interesting side effect of reading the report is to feel that anyone who claims to have understood its arguments, purposes, and consequences within twenty-four or forty-eight hours of encountering it is likely untrustworthy.

A circle of young black playwrights is doing some of the most vital work in American theater. And Perry is at its center.

Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

On the shared life of Tatiana and Krista Hogan:

The girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a 
gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

How is it that literature has produced a wealth of information about the sex lives of straight white men and yet so little about the abortions they have or have not paid for?

The motley gang of L.A. teens that cat-burgled celebrities, sometimes repeatedly, in search of designer clothes, jewelry, and something to do. The story that became The Bling Ring.

Obinwanne Okeke was supposed to be a rags-to-riches Nigerian success story, was even featured on the cover of Forbes. Then the feds followed the money.

Mexico City has one of the most ambitious and sophisticated video surveillance systems in the world. But it hasn’t stopped crime.

“In all his life, this was the moment of his greatest defeat.” On the death of George McGovern’s daughter on a cold winter night in Madison, Wisconsin.

An engineering team races to create a next-generation computer.

The first installment of The Soul of a New Machine.

“Twenty-five years ago, I used to live in fear of Trevor Latham kicking my ass nearly every day. I grew up to be a writer. He grew up to run one of the toughest biker gangs in America. And then I tracked him down.”

Barbara Williamson co-founded Sandstone, one of the most famous radical experiments in group sex and communal living of the 1970s. Then she got wild.

In the face of death threats, a forensic anthropologist has spent two decades exhuming the victims of a “dirty” civil war. Now his work might help bring justice for their murders.

How a pair of HGTV stars are trying to renovate the reputation of Waco, Texas.