In the basement of the White House, in an office with no windows, an MFA grad named Ben Rhodes is telling the story of America’s foreign policy.

When the most famous amnesiac in history died, the battle for custody of his brain began.

“Missy (Misdemeanor) Elliott, the twenty-five-year-old hip-hop performer who is energetically redefining the boundaries of rap music, is a singer, a songwriter, an arranger, a producer, and a talent scout. Six months ago, few people outside the music industry had heard of her; six months from now, it will be necessary to pretend that you’ve known about Missy Elliott for years.”

Kids say it’s fun to take cars. They brag to each other about how many they’ve stolen and the sleekest models they’ve sped away in. They say they are bored and that it’s easy, sharing videos of themselves driving at 120 miles per hour. They smile with key fobs, offering rides on Facebook. But all of the biggest car thieves had something to run from.

“Didion was one of the boys, clearly, in the sense that men had noticed her writing and wanted to publish her. But she also couldn’t quite fit into their regime.”

After the blockbuster success of Kong: Skull Island, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts fled Hollywood to live the expat dream life in Vietnam. Then, one night at a Saigon club, he was brutally beaten by a mysterious mob of gangsters. Who were these monsters? Soon, he began directing something entirely different—an international hunt for the men who nearly killed him.

“The Farsi Island mission was a gross failure, involving issues that have plagued the Navy in recent years: inadequate training, poor leadership, and a disinclination to heed the warnings of its men and women about the true extent of its vulnerabilities.”

They were an organized group of ex-strippers, plus a few role players recruited from Craigslist. They fished for marks in strip clubs, Wall Street cocktail bars, and even TGI Fridays, and then lured them to strip clubs. The marks woke up with little memory of the night before and their credit cards maxed out.

Punitive notions of disease have a long history, and such notions are particularly active with cancer. There is the “fight” or “crusade” against cancer; cancer is the “killer” disease; people who have cancer are “cancer victims.” Ostensibly, the illness is the culprit. But it is also the cancer patient who is made culpable.

How MSG became “perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food.”

On Westmont College, a “feeder school” to the upper ranks of the Christian conservative movement.

“Turns out your laptop—or camera or gaming system or gold necklace—may have a smidgen of Congo’s pain somewhere in it.”

Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and his four years of production on Gravity.

They advertise murder for hire but work for the government. Inside the world of America’s fake hit men.

The war between Major League Baseball and Alex Rodriguez, “fought with six-figure payoffs in the tanning salons and strip malls of South Florida.”

“Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans.”

A bungled operation in Honduras and the enduring ineffectiveness of America’s war on drugs.

It comes from the soil of the desert Southwest. Inhaled, it can cause incurable, even fatal illness. And, thanks to global warming, valley fever is spreading fast.

After nine months of striking out, Chris McKinlay decided to change his online dating strategy. It worked.

Trying to understand the appeal of Eve Online.

A profile of former club kid Michael Alig, who is approaching release after serving 17 years in jail for murder.