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 Dutch traffic engineer showed that streets without signs are safer than those cluttered with arrows, painted lines, and lights.

Christopher Clayton Hutton hatched a plan to deliver Monopoly boards to British prisoners of war. The games were advertised as a diversion, but really they offered a way out.

In the age of citizen journalism, smartphones and streaming video, bearing witness to human rights violations is getting easier. Is it also making justice more complicated?

I’ve read stories from people who say they always knew they were attracted to the same sex, or that they figured it out at a young age. I’m not one of them.

A teenage Florida hacker crew, millions of credit cards numbers stolen by driving by big box stores and entering their networks, $1.1 million in cash buried in a backyard, an FBI snitch,  and how it all fell apart.

Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong tabloid tycoon, thinks he’s found the future of journalism: an animation assembly line that can crank out clips recreating–or anticipating, or imagining–breaking news.

Only 16 counties regularly impose death sentences, and they have three things in common: overaggressive prosecutors, defense lawyers who aren’t up to the task and cultural legacies of racial bias. Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit is among them.

Music writer Mark Fisher (who died this week) on the decline of Michael Jackson.

Bomb makers—including ISIS—have been on a quest to obtain red mercury, a weapon reputed to be powerful enough to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” They haven’t found it yet. That might be because it doesn’t exist.

A profile of Chencho Dorji, Bhutan’s first psychiatrist, who has treated “more than 5,300 depressed, anxious, psychotic and drug-addled” people since 1999.

The Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918 reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

Some cops give their friends and family union-issued “courtesy cards” to help get them out of minor infractions. The cards embody everything wrong with modern policing.

I used to believe the art world was at war with itself, that money was fighting art and vice versa. But I’ve been living in my own ambivalence about things for a decade now, or more, and I’m starting to think it’s not a war but a new equilibrium state, defined by that ambivalence.

The Constitution and its worshippers.

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.

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.

A 21-year-old falls into a coma from which he’ll never emerge. His mother, desperate to grant his wish of becoming a father, has his sperm preserved. Two years later, after a fruitless search for other alternatives, she finds a willing doctor and tries one last option: carrying her son’s child herself.

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.

The biomass industry is warming up the South’s economy, but many experts worry it’s doing the same to the climate. Will the Biden Administration embrace it, or cut it loose?

A profile of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and de facto campaign manager.