Purdue Pharma’s marketing materials say OxyContin works for 12 hours. It doesn’t. And this problem, long-denied by the drugmaker, is what makes it highly addictive.

Melania Trump’s life as First Lady.

The Columbia shuttle was to be a revolution for NASA. But a year before its first launch, the shuttle was several years behind schedule, had cost $1 billion, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever get off the ground.

Inside the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan:

The U.S. government has lied to itself, and to its citizens, about the nature and actions of successive Pakistani governments. Pakistani behavior over the past 20 years has rendered the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism effectively meaningless.

“The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response. The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.”

“What follows is my attempt, based on a few increasingly hostile exchanges and a close reading of his terrible book, not only to examine why Mariotti is currently jobless but to explain why, in a sane world, he should forever remain that way. I present this as a cautionary tale for other sportswriters, both young and old.”

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.

The surreal existence of an AOL content writer:

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie.

“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own ­aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know ­whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”

Richard Hell after Lexington.

A meditation on Hell.

A profile of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Workweek.

How 4 Mexican immigrant kids and their cheap robot beat MIT.

The bureaucratic hell of enforcing legislation in Washington.

It was Hell.

A year after her ‘Hell,’ Olga Sharypova is ready to speak out.

An Indian boy ran 40 miles at age 4. Fame followed—and a custody battle.

Millions of American workers sign away legal rights without knowing what they’re in for: Arbitration Hell.

Searching for answers 40 years after a Brooklyn man threw acid in the face of his 4-year-old neighbor.

In New York City, every 4-year-old has access to free early education—even those whose families make up the 1 percent.