On the political climate in Arizona.

Wayne Simmons was ideal conservative commentator. A former C.I.A. operative, he ate lunch with Donald Rumsfeld, took trips to Guantánamo aboard Air Force Two, and pumped the party line on Fox News. There was only one problem: Simmons had never been in the C.I.A.

During the financial crisis, Sal Pane ran a multimillion-dollar mortgage scam. A few years later, with the help of some high-profile media appearances and a dead man's resume, he won the government contract to clean up Ebola in New York.

" I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets..."

She was a thirteen-year-old from the Chabad Lubavitch community who would dip into a barbershop bathroom to swap her orthodox clothes for those of a streetwalker. Her pimping and rape allegations against a group of black men in their twenties, repeatedly recanted and then reaffirmed, would send the D.A.’s office into disarray.

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

In 2016, a West Virginia police officer came upon a young man in distress who asked the officer to shoot him. The officer didn’t. A few minutes, another officer did. Only one of them lost their job.

More than 50 years after Nelson Rockefeller's son went missing following a boat accident in New Guinea, the true story emerges. He made it to shore, but didn't make it much farther.

Excerpted from </em>Savage Harvest</a>.</p>

Ah yes, you should also know that most of your colleagues are some of the biggest neurotics in the country, so you might as well get used right now to the way they're gonna be writing you five and ten page single spaced inflammatory letters reviling you for knocking some group that they have proved is the next Stones.

This presentation was shown to potential recruits for the new Maven SI venture, and it details exactly how the people now in charge of Sports Illustrated plan on turning it into the sort of volume-driven content farm that ruled the web a dozen or so tweaks of the Google algorithm ago.

Paul Skalnik has a decades-long criminal record and may be one of the most prolific jailhouse informants in U.S. history. The state of Florida is planning to execute a man based largely on his word.

Many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. And at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.

Why do Syrian civilians in a Turkish camp live in relative luxury?

A profile of Ken Regan, a computer scientist, chess master, and world champion at detecting cheaters in chess.

How the Baylor University Medical Center became a force in the heart transplant business.

Millions of American workers sign away legal rights without knowing what they’re in for: Arbitration Hell.

“The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront everyday.”

The irreconcilable differences between Orthodoxy and secularism increasingly end up in court.

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.

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

A first-person account of an arrest:

I stared at the yellow walls and listened to a few officers talk about the overtime they were racking up, and I decided that I hated country music. I hated speedboats and shitty beer in coozies and fat bellies and rednecks. I thought about Abu Ghraib and the horror to which those prisoners were exposed. I thought about my dad and his prescience. I was glad he wasn’t alive to know about what was happening to me. I thought about my kids, and what would have happened if they had been there when I got taken away. I contemplated never flying again. I thought about the incredible waste of taxpayer dollars in conducting an operation like this. I wondered what my rights were, if I had any at all. Mostly, I could not believe I was sitting in some jail cell in some cold, undisclosed building surrounded by “the authorities.”