A profile of singer-songwriter Will Oldham.

He has settled into character as an uncanny troubadour, singing a sort of transfigured country music, and he has become, in his own subterranean way, a canonical figure. Johnny Cash covered him, Björk has championed him (she invited him to appear on the soundtrack of “Drawing Restraint 9”), and Madonna, he suspects, has quoted him (her song “Let It Will Be” seems to borrow from his “O Let It Be,” though he says, “I’m fully prepared to accept that it’s a coincidence”).

“What I do is not magical realism. I do realistic magic. Look, whenever someone does something new, people have to compare it with things they already know. So even if you innovate, you end up being connected to the past. When I began making movies people linked me to Fellini or Buñuel. Now new filmmakers are called ‘jodorowskian.’”

In 1980, a bankrupt gambler came up with a plan to get his money back. He built an incredibly complex bomb, one that was impossible to defuse and that only he knew how to move, and snuck it into a Lake Tahoe casino with an extortion note demanding $3 million. Part of the plan worked. Part of it did not.

‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.”

On Westmont College, a “feeder school” to the upper ranks of the Christian conservative movement.

Jamie Leigh Jones’s story of gang-rape in Iraq changed the law to help victims, even though she might not have been one herself.

It mostly had to do with Patch, the executive’s hyperlocal and unprofitable baby.

In 2008, Hana Williams left an Ethiopian orphanage to join a large, Christian fundamentalist family in America. Three years later she was dead.

It comes from the soil of the desert Southwest. Inhaled, it can cause incurable, even fatal illness. And, thanks to global warming, valley fever is spreading fast.

Trying to understand the appeal of Eve Online.

She believed she had survived the worst time of her life. But there was more to come.

The road to Lhakpa Sherpa’s seventh potential summit​ has been nothing if not complicated.

The hard luck stories of Trump fans in Florida, New Hampshire, and Iowa, including that of a man who legally changed his name to Donald Trump Jr.

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.

Jonathan Kos-Read’s long, strange trip to movie stardom.

The state attorney, who prosecuted Marissa Alexander and failed to convict George Zimmerman, has put hundreds of children behind bars.

The story of a pair of murdered whooping cranes and just how difficult it is to save a endangered species.

In New York City, every 4-year-old has access to free early education—even those whose families make up the 1 percent.

How an obsessive New Age hustler brought the sound of the ocean to millions of home stereos.

Mary Kuanen escaped the violence of Sudan only to live through her husband’s murder in suburban Denver. This is her life today.

What it takes to defect from the military state of one of the world’s youngest countries.

An investigation into America’s largest chain of psychiatric hospitals, where patients are held against their will to maximize profits.

The Harvard Law School legend has defended everyone from O.J. Simpson to Claus von Bülow. Now he’s facing his toughest case yet: his own.

ProDoula wants to revolutionize the touchy-feely doula profession — and make millions of dollars along the way.