Li Dao, a young Minnesota nurse, appeared in suicide chat rooms, contacted the most desperate, and made pacts to die with them via webcam. After some in the forum caught on, Dao disappeared; or rather, Dao had never existed at all. She was a middle-aged man. And he may have encouraged and witnessed dozens of live suicides.

Hervé Falciani, a computer engineer working at HSBC, stole the bank’s list of secret accounts. But was he out to expose tax cheats or get rich himself? Perhaps both.

The agonies of being overweight—or running a diet company—in a culture that likes to pretend it only cares about health, not size.

“Successful brand identities in the House and on talk radio have never before relied on such similar skill sets — there has never been so much politics in media, and media in politics.”

On Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr and now Slack, a wildly popular, difficult-to-describe messaging service that has 38,000 paying subscribers just a few months after launching.

In 1980, Richard Pryor doused himself in rum, lit himself, and streaked though the streets or Northridge in a ball of flames. He would go on to live another 25 years.

“The concussion that led Borland to retire came on a routine play, and that’s precisely his point.”

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.”

How cops are using nuisance abatement actions to put New Yorkers on the streets.

What adolescence does to adolescents is nowhere near as brutal as what it does to their parents.

An excerpt from All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Depending on who you ask, Mohammed Jawad was either 12 or 17 when he was detained. Nobody disputes that he spent seven years at Guantánamo before he was exonerated. The story of a boy who grew up as a detainee.

On the motivations and techniques of a prolific book thief who “built a vast collection of rare works, most of which he will never read and no one will ever see.”

A profile of Rupert Murdoch from 1995, as he fought monopoly charges in the U.S. and U.K. and prepared to expand his empire into China.

Murdoch is a pirate; he will cunningly circumvent rules, and sometimes principles, to get his way, as his recent adventures in China demonstrate.

What happened to Wesley Autrey after he jumped in front of a New York City subway train to save a man’s life.

On a convict too young to vote but old enough to be strapped to a chair.

From our guide to the death penalty at Slate.

Relying on programmers to map real world social connections is like “hiring a Mormon bartender” and other observations on why our strange urge to document the nodes of friendship is doomed.

“That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy.”

In 1987, a terrible accident kills five Ole Miss sorority members. The author catches up with her Chi Omega sisters who survived.

A history of the divide between computing and language, and why we “define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand.’”

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

A woman thought a Coen brothers movie was a “true story” and tracked it to her death. Now someone’s made a fictional film about her, further blurring the lines between reality and artifice.