As an “angry young man,” Ghost World author Daniel Clowes insulted Stan Lee and Art Spiegelman in a graphic novel’s satirical alternate reality. It was born from a nagging self-doubt that, despite the cartoonist’s current recognition and status, lingers.

“At 54, after 30 years of marriage and two of loneliness, I went online to find a man and found Dean.”

A three-part essay on love, loss, and what comes in between.

Every time a bicyclist rides on an open road, we entrust their lives to a safety net of legal protection and basic human decency. That system has failed.

It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond. Yet in drought-ravaged California, hedge funds are racing to plant as many new trees as they can.

The strange, gun-filled life of the “King of Instragram,” a failed NAVY Seal trainee turned poker-playing playboy with an exiled fraudster for a father and two heart attacks already under his belt.

The team’s grand, analytics-driven experiment led by a business school grad who won the GM job after giving a “PowerPoint presentation that Sixers executives now recall as an ‘investment thesis.’”

Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.

The CNN anchor may not be the clueless bumbler the internet believes him to be.

In 1948, a man was found on a beach in South Australia. The circumstances of his death and his identity were rich with mystery. When an amateur sleuth became obsessed, he could not imagine where the clues would lead him.

A trip to the writers’ room of The Onion spinoff, which started as a BuzzFeed parody but has morphed into something else: “the institutional voice of the Internet.”

On Michael Lewis and the global financial crisis.

Previously: The Michael Lewis World Tour of Economic Collapse

After losing his sight at age 3, Michael May went on to become the first blind CIA agent, set a world record for downhill skiing, and start a successful Silicon Valley company. Then he got the chance to see again.

A profile of Rebekah Brooks, who started as a secretary at News of the World and became CEO of News International by 41, developing an incredibly close relationship with Rupert Murdoch along the way.

The man 27-year-old Victoria Donda believed to be her father shot himself after  being revealed as a former member of an Argentinean death squad. Immediately after, a human rights group came to her with information on her birth parents: murdered political prisoners.

An oral history of Saturday Night Live.

Part of our guide to SNL for Slate.

A profile of Quentin Rowan, a.k.a. Q. R. Markham, ‘author’ of last fall’s short-lived spy novel hit Assassins of Secrets, which was pieced together using more than a dozen sources.

On the mysterious disappearance of a beloved coding legend (and his code) with stops along the way for a short history of programming languages, an ethnography of code-based communities, and an inquiry into what it means to “die young without artifact.”

Jonathan Blow is both the video game industry’s most cynical critic and its most ambitious game developer. As he finishes his indescribable game-opus, a trip inside the head of a videogame auteur.

A profile of 22-year-old hacker George Hotz, who in 2007 became the first person to successfully unlock the iPhone. A few years later, he became the first person to successfully hack the Playstation 3. And, shortly thereafter, he became the first person to get sued by Sony for it.

Revealing the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians during a 1968 search-and-destroy mission on a rumored Viet Gong stronghold, often referred to in military circles as Pinkville, actually the village of My Lai.

When U.S. customs law met abstract art in the form of a bird, “shimmering and soaring toward the ceiling while the lawyers debated whether it was an ‘original sculpture’ or a metal ‘article or ware not specially provided for’ under the 1922 Tariff Act.”

The improbable and true story of how Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Marion Barry’s wife, and Tucker Carlson (yes, that Tucker Carlson) flew to Liberia to negotiate a ceasefire in the midst of a civil war.

A growing movement is seeking a deeper knowledge of themselves through tracking sleep, exercise, sex, food, location, productivity. Technology has made it possible—but hasn’t taught us how to interpret the findings.

A 1992 Q&A with Woody Allen, conducted in the midst of the media swarm around his newly public relationship with Soon-Yi.

He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her.  No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.