Who was Omar Mateen?

Every table at Damon Baehrel’s restaurant is booked until 2025. Or is it?

We know that certain programs can help prevent gun deaths among black men. No one in Washington seems to care.

Rob Billot spent eight years defending corporate clients in environmental cases. Then Wilbur Tennant called.

How did a tenure-track professor wind up selling his plasma? A story about debt.

Officers can lie to juries or brutally beat civilians and still keep their jobs.

A 23-year-old living in Chile was suddenly attacked and buried alive by her roommate. She later learned she wasn’t his first – or last – victim.

How an obscure legal document turned New York’s court system into a debt-collection machine.

As Friday’s deadline approaches, a federal employee wonders: “How am I supposed to dig out?”

A confrontation with masculinity gone awry.

An amateur sleuth tracks runners who cheat. But how far should he go?

A junior Microsoft engineer figured out a nearly perfect Bitcoin generation scheme.

America’s most fearless satirist has seen his wildest fictions become reality.

The North Korean dictator kidnaps a famous actress and her film director husband, then invites them to dinner to chat about it.

“A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? Let’s find out.”

The inside story of the megadonor and the Chinese casino money flooding our elections.

The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.

How Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter transformed advertising:

What makes soap interesting? Why choose one brand over another? Dichter’s first contract was with the Compton Advertising Agency, to help them sell Ivory soap. Market research typically involved asking shoppers questions like “Why do you use this brand of soap?” Or, more provocatively, “Why don’t you use this brand of soap?” Regarding such lines of inquiry as useless, Dichter instead conducted a hundred so-called “depth interviews”, or open-ended conversations, about his subjects’ most recent scrubbing experiences. The approach was not unlike therapy, with Dichter mining the responses for encoded, unconscious motives and desires. In the case of soap, he found that bathing was a ritual that afforded rare moments of personal indulgence, particularly before a romantic date (“You never can tell,” explained one woman). He discerned an erotic element to bathing, observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical American [is] allowed to caress himself or herself [is] while applying soap.” As for why customers picked a particular brand, Dichter concluded that it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or “personality” of the soap.

But now, being a celebrity yourself, you feel differently? I've subsequently changed my opinion. Brad Pitt doesn't have a superpower at his back. He just has some crazed fans and paparazzi. But now, having had all three, I must say, I'm not terribly impressed with the experience.

Raising a cow on an industrial feedlot.

The latest WikiLeaks unveiling has exposed more than 250,000 sensitive messages from American diplomats. Among the revelations: the plan for a unified Korea, the Chinese government’s hacking strategy, and negotiations with countries for housing Gitmo detainees.