A profile of 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, the newly crowned Miss America.

How Frank and Jamie McCourt bought the Dodgers for “for less than the price of an oceanfront home in Southampton” and eventually became entangled in one of the most expensive divorces in California history, which laid bare their finances and confirmed what many already knew: they had bankrupted one of the most storied franchises in baseball.

In all, the McCourts reportedly took $108 million out of the team in personal distributions over five years—a sum that Molly Knight, a reporter with ESPN who has extensively covered the story, notes is eerily similar to the cash payment that she says Frank McCourt has claimed he made for the team.

What are the foreign policy views of Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney?

By 2006, S&P was making its own study of such loans' performance. It singled out 639,981 loans made in 2002 to see if its benign assumptions had held up. They hadn't. Loans with piggybacks were 43% more likely to default than other loans, S&P found. In April 2006, S&P said it would raise by July the amount of collateral underwriters must include in many new mortgage portfolios. For instance, S&P could require that mortgage pools have extra loans in them, since it now expected a larger number to go bad. Still, S&P didn't lower its ratings on existing securities, saying it had to further monitor the performance of loans backing them. It thus helped the market for these loans hold up through the end of 2006.

An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.

On Sam Jain and Daniel Sundin, the fugitive kings of scareware.

On the tangled early careers of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr and Jeffrey Eugenides.

The Starbucks-fueled saga of how Jim Romenesko, beloved journalism blogger, took an early retirement.

After the United States demanded the extradition of a drug lord, a bloodletting ensued.

A step-by-step proposal for fixing the broken economics of big-time college sports.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

A reporter makes it his mission to track down all 42 members of a platoon after their service in Iraq.

In Michele Bachmann’s home district evangelicals have pushed anti-gay policies to the school board. After a rash of suicides, teens are fighting back.

Pavel Galitsky, 100 years old, blogger and Skyper, survivor of 15 years in Stalin’s Siberian Kolyma mines.

“In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.”

A newspaper writer’s attempt to solve the mystery of a homeless man who claims to be a once-famous boxer.

A chronicle of the 2010 wildfire that burned down 169 homes in Colorado, told via the people who lived through it.

On a press junket in Ecuador, the author investigates the ethics of shopping.

A report from the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk—a.k.a. “The Last Nazi”—who died on March 17.

A profile of the eccentric Gene Weingarten, the only person to twice win the Pulitzer for feature writing.

The rise of the long-haul trucker/serial killer, as excerpted from Ginger Strand’s book Killer on the Road.

A Yale student on why nearly a quarter of her classmates will end up working for Wall Street.

The international battle over 17 tons of coins discovered by an American deep-sea treasure hunting company.

A tech reporter tells the story of his ruined digital life.

The truncated, violent lives of Richard Matt and David Sweat before their prison escape.