A charming assistant funeral home director named Bernie Tiede murders a wealthy widow, keeps her in a freezer for months, finally gets caught, and still has the town's sympathy as his case goes to trial. The story that became Richard Linklater's Bernie.

“Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.”

As the U.S. heads toward the winter, the country is going round in circles, making the same conceptual errors that have plagued it since spring.

Residents have lived near more than 100 massive petroleum storage tanks for decades, never really knowing if they’re breathing in dangerous chemicals. Now they’re fighting to find out.

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

A conversation with Vasily Gotov:

"Russia undoubtedly celebrated the reports in American media about its activities. They want to instill doubt. They want to be part of the agenda. They want to penetrate our media culture. Russian penetration is dramatically overstated in American media, but that only serves them better. It creates the impression that they're more powerful than they are. That discussions like this are necessary at all is a tremendous win for Russia."

How coach Jurgen Klinsmann, “soccer’s Alexis de Tocqueville,” is trying to give the US an identity.

The Harvard Law professsor on billionaires, politics and Uber.

A profile of the writer behind “Deep Thoughts” on Saturday Night Live.

Grizzly Bear and the surprisingly crappy economics of indie rock stardom.

After a 19-year-old is convicted of murdering his girlfriend, her family fights to free him from prison.

Tales of mayhem on the set of The Canyons.

The U.S. Department of Justice investigates the Blackwater founder’s new firm.

On the overstated effect of the Santa Ana winds on human behavior and the understated impact of climate change on LA’s seasons.

The fabled venue where the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and Prince emerged.

A veteran with PTSD takes on the fighter jets that fly above his sanctuary on the Olympic Peninsula.

The world’s richest prisoner interviewed from the Siberian prison colony he calls home.

A profile of computational biologist Eric Schadt, the guy who’s figuring out what comes next after the Human Genome Project.

On internships at Disney World, where “labor is meant to have an almost invisible quality.”

A reporter recounts her weekend as an undercover Juggalette.

A blow-by-blow account of Howard Unruh’s slow, deadly walk through Camden, New Jersey – filed an hour before deadline.