How the Jesuit Church refused to stop pedophile priest:

"He truly is the Hannibal Lecter of the clerical world. He did more psychological and physical damage to children than anyone else. And what makes it worse is that the Jesuits knew about it, and did nothing."

In pre-modern poetry, Shakespeare, who mentioned everything, would probably have name checked products if he could, but there were few goods with the maker’s name on them: though he would specify the street or town which had given origin to a certain cut of sleeve.

A profile of California congressman Darrell Issa:

A few days after we met in Las Vegas, Issa called me. He was concerned about all my questions regarding his early life and didn’t see why they were newsworthy. The conversation was awkward.

Yemen on the brink of hell:

In a sense, south Yemen itself offers a grim cautionary tale about the events now unfolding in Taiz and across the country. Until 1990, when the two Yemens merged, South Yemen was a beacon of development and order. Under the British, who ruled the south as a colony until 1967, and the Socialists, who ran it for two decades afterward, South Yemen had much higher literacy rates than the north. Child marriage and other degrading tribal practices came to an end; women entered the work force, and the full facial veil became a rarity. It was only after Ali Abdullah Saleh imposed his writ that things began to change. When the south dared to rebel against him in 1994, Saleh sent bands of jihadis to punish it. The north began treating the south like a slave state, expropriating vast plots of private and public land for northerners, along with the oil profits. Tribal practices returned. Violent jihadism began to grow.

A profile of twenty-seven-year-old James O’Keefe, who came to national attention during the last election after his prank videos stung ACORN and Planned Parenthood. A subsequent attempt to bug Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones resulted in jail time for O’Keefe.

A profile of Vogue Creative Director André Leon Talley.

From our guide to haute couture genius at Slate.

At a dinner party, the author meets one of Afghanistan’s last remaining maskhara — an entertainer, thief and murderer.

On the marriage of Ponzi schemer Ken Starr and his fourth wife, Diane Passage, whom he met while she was dancing at a strip club.

The Haqqani family, an organized crime militia dubbed the “Sopranos of the Afghanistan war,” will almost surely outlast the U.S. occupation and thus seize tremendous power after the U.S. exits.

The body of a 38-year-old woman lay on her couch with the TV continuously running BBC for three years. Who was she, and why did it take three years for her to be discovered?

On the magic of mother’s milk, which changes daily to meet the baby’s needs and can even start fighting an infection before anyone knows the kid is sick.

Shakiya Robertson thought she had found a way get her family a home. She moved in, fixed the place up, made all the payments. Then she, like thousands of others in Detroit, was told that the house she thought she had purchased wasn’t actually hers.

An interview about Black Lives Matter and the last 18 months of activism in America.

A profile of the editor behind Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Jay Z’s Decoded, and more.

A conversation with the former first lady five years into her life as a widow.

It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond. Yet in drought-ravaged California, hedge funds are racing to plant as many new trees as they can.

How the author’s father wrote over 400 pieces of “pirate porn, ghost porn, science-fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret-agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn and Atlantis porn.”

Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.

Growing up among the tall waves and schoolyard bullies of Hawaii.

In 1948, a man was found on a beach in South Australia. The circumstances of his death and his identity were rich with mystery. When an amateur sleuth became obsessed, he could not imagine where the clues would lead him.

The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land, ethnicity, clan, and alliance.

In a cable brought to light by Wikileaks, the Ambassador to Russia describes a raucous three-day Dagestani wedding attended by Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov.

How Yvette Vickers, a B-movie starlet who had appeared in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, ended up mummified in her Los Angeles home last year.

On solitary confinement:

"Two or three hundred years from now people will look back on this lockdown mania like we look back on the burning of witches."

The Republican candidate works a room, as excerpted from Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of the senator:

No one can do that day after day, week after week, for years ... without some rock-hard certainty that can't be milled away by nonsense and stress. He has to know: Why him? And: Why now? ... He has to know that he is The One. And if he's strong enough to keep going-if he's able, smart, and lucky-then, he'll get to the final twist in the road, when things catch fire, he can see how his words make the people feel, he can feel how those words now matter to him. He can make all the difference just by walking into a room. There are thousands of people -- and they want him. He and his campaign fill the lives of people who are almost strangers, and he takes over the life of everyone dear to him. He has to, it's all right -- because it's that important. Now, he knows: Not only should I be President, I am going to be President!