There are people of all genders and political persuasions looking to walk the plank of the good ship Reality before they’re pushed, but I’ve never met so many so transparently trying to con as many fellow travelers on their way down.

For years, rural Guatemalans traveled thousands of miles for jobs in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. A series of immigration raids is creating havoc in a town desperate for workers.

A profile of the climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, dubbed Spider-Man by the French press, who describes robbery as an act of imagination.

The University of Maryland waited 18 days to inform students of a virus on campus. That decision left vulnerable students like Olivia Paregol in the dark.

The story of a young man from rural Ghana who bought a pair of secret camera glasses and got himself smuggled across the Sahara, to film crime and exploitation along the way.

When deep sea diver Dave Shaw reached the bottom of Bushman’s Hole, he discovered the body of Deon Dreyer. Though Dreyer had been gone for 10 years, Shaw was determined to bring him back.

It took only a handful of people to wrongly convict Ed Ates of murder. It took an army to free him from prison. Now comes the hard part.

How legends of the American music industry made millions off the work of Solomon Linda, a Zulu tribesman who wrote “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and died a pauper.

The curious tale of a man called Christian, the Catholic church, David Schwimmer’s wife, a secret hotel and an Airbnb scam running riot on the streets of London

A viral video in which Dr. Annie Bukacek questions the severity of COVID-19 has given anti-lockdown activists across the country a sense of validation.

Every year eleven million people attend Magh Mela, a Hindu festival on the banks of the Ganges. The temporary infrastructure to support them includes hospitals and power stations, plus a massive surveillance apparatus.

Dozens of military contractors, most of them Black, have been jailed in the emirate — some on trumped-up drug charges. Why has the American government failed to help them?

As the country heads into a dangerous new phase of the pandemic, the government’s management of the P.P.E. crisis has left the private sector still straining to meet anticipated demand.

On Black nonchalance.

Gold and diamond grills. Stilettos you can’t walk in. Grandly arching fingernails, lovingly adorned. Such flouting of functionality is an obvious fuck-­you to the days of scrutinized teeth at auctions and picking cotton on plantations.

Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar and David Thompson bonded in juvenile detention in the 1980s, then spent most of the next 40 years in prison. When they emerged from one of the country’s most unforgiving state penal systems, their friendship proved crucial.

“The remains of a sunken village nearby make me realize that the process is inexorable. Of this seventy-five-house village, there is almost nothing left.”

Amid the complex web of international trade, proving the authenticity of a product can be near-impossible. But one company is taking the search to the atomic level.

An essay on poetry and madness.

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else.

Two 16-year-olds form a suicide pact, driving a Pontiac off a cliff. One of the boys survives:

To many of the people in Fillmore who considered the incident a cause for civic mourning and self-scrutiny, the idea of trying Joe for murdering his best friend seemed outlandish. To a prosecutor, however, the indictment had its own logic. The Ventura County district attorney, Michael Bradbury, was an aggressive law-and-order man, and he had a potentially strong case. With Joe's repeated announcements of his plan to drive off the cliff, the crucial element of premeditation was undeniably present.

But you were drinking and having premarital sex, right? Isn’t that kind of an indirect way of questioning your faith? Is disobeying questioning? It can be, but I don't think I was really pondering questions of faith when I started drinking in high school, and the premarital sex didn't actually happen until after I graduated. I think looking back the answer is yes, I was looking at other options. But I didn't think about it in those terms then. I think lots of people of every faith experiment in these ways but ultimately decide to embrace their religion.

In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I'll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, "Mary," from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She'd sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption.

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.