The house at 114 Lake Avenue in Bristol, CT that kept calling Aaron Hernandez, a NFL star by 20, back to “a volatile underworld of guns, drugs, and violence.”

On the lives of the men who gang-raped a woman on a Delhi bus last year, the life of their victim, and the people left out of India’s growing prosperity.

How Michael Manos, a.k.a. the Glam Scammer, a career con man who relied on a combination of fake reality TV shows and fake fundraisers to bilk people in Atlanta, Dallas, and D.C., finally got caught.

In 1916, a pair of 29-year-old women, bored with their lives in Upstate New York, took teaching jobs in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains. This is the story of what they found.

Eleven members of an Australian rugby club traveled to Bali. After a bomb went off at a nightclub, only five of them made it home.

“Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”

On the many lives and careers of Owsley Stanley (1935-2011), chemist, sound design innovator, and outback jeweler, whose name appears in the OED as a synonym for “a particularly pure form of LSD.”

From the Tower of Babel to the birthplace of Abraham, from Saddam’s ruined palaces to fortified blast-proof checkpoints, a diary from a nine-day, eight-night tour of Mespotamia/Iraq.

The rise, fall and stubborn survival of a teenage Internet celebrity who discovered that the real world can be a very scary place.

Louis C.K. has a deal unlike anyone else’s on TV: his network, FX, has no approval rights and offers no notes. He is also the show’s lone writer, editor, director, and star. A profile.

A profile of silent film comedian Buster Keaton:

The story of his life seems in its twists and dives borrowed from his movies, survival demanding a pure lack of sentiment.

A profile of California congressman Darrell Issa:

A few days after we met in Las Vegas, Issa called me. He was concerned about all my questions regarding his early life and didn’t see why they were newsworthy. The conversation was awkward.

The story of an imam convicted on a suspect terrorism charge and the place he was sent: a jail in the Midwest where nearly all of the prisoners are Muslims.

A profile of twenty-seven-year-old James O’Keefe, who came to national attention during the last election after his prank videos stung ACORN and Planned Parenthood. A subsequent attempt to bug Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones resulted in jail time for O’Keefe.

The idea that people would “inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility” was supposed to create wealth and wellbeing. Has it instead created a technologically advanced dystopia?

On being South Africa’s “public protector,” charged with watching over the people who once liberated it.

The police told Lara McLeod to report her rape. Then they arrested her for lying.

A portrait of Speidi today, complete with crystals, tequila and a vacillation “between having no regrets and having many.”

Shakiya Robertson thought she had found a way get her family a home. She moved in, fixed the place up, made all the payments. Then she, like thousands of others in Detroit, was told that the house she thought she had purchased wasn’t actually hers.

How the woman who brought Westboro Baptist to Twitter came to question the church’s beliefs.

An interview about Black Lives Matter and the last 18 months of activism in America.

Searching for a ghost of Meyer Lansky’s Cuba, a sex-show star who quietly disappeared from the island and was later immortalized in The Godfather Part II.

She was a young plutonium worker whose Honda Civic Hatchback ran off the road and smashed into the wall of a concrete culvert. In her trunk were manila folders full of documents, which immediately went missing.