In 2015, my friend and I went to Disney World. Three years later, she went on a solo trip to prison.

A first-person account of an arrest:

I stared at the yellow walls and listened to a few officers talk about the overtime they were racking up, and I decided that I hated country music. I hated speedboats and shitty beer in coozies and fat bellies and rednecks. I thought about Abu Ghraib and the horror to which those prisoners were exposed. I thought about my dad and his prescience. I was glad he wasn’t alive to know about what was happening to me. I thought about my kids, and what would have happened if they had been there when I got taken away. I contemplated never flying again. I thought about the incredible waste of taxpayer dollars in conducting an operation like this. I wondered what my rights were, if I had any at all. Mostly, I could not believe I was sitting in some jail cell in some cold, undisclosed building surrounded by “the authorities.”

The story of Tyrone Hood, who served 21 years for a murder he didn’t commit, and the Chicago criminal justice apparatus that allowed a serial killer to go free.

A profile of the Megaupload founder, who has started a political party in New Zealand as the U.S. continues to fight for his extradition.

The rapper who never grew up.

“The U.S. patent code was never meant to cover your genes, your cells, your blood, or the marrow in your bones. But it does. And the worst thing is, it’s too late for you to do anything about it. You’ve already been sold.”

Las Vegas casinos operating in Macau rely on “junkets” to bring in the gambling elite, but the money and murder for hire trails lead straight to the Triads.

How Warren Beatty seduced the studios into making the comedy Ishtar, which set the modern bar for cinematic debacles. (An excerpt from Peter Biskind’s Star.)

What happened when the founder of North Face and Esprit bought a chunk of Chile the size of a small state, intending to live with a select group inside it and turn it case study for ecological preservation. It turned out, however, that Chileans didn’t really like that idea.

How women in the L.A. comedy scene, long pressured to stay quiet about sexual abuse and harassment for the sake of their careers, began to fight back.

“In a landscape in which black people dominate the culture but have few recognized channels to respond to it, the show, which stars two American black men, provides a venue for black authority in the mainstream.”

How is it that literature has produced a wealth of information about the sex lives of straight white men and yet so little about the abortions they have or have not paid for?

In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I'll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, "Mary," from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She'd sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption.

In 1966, Anton LaVey introduced the world to the Church of Satan. The 1980s saw a “Satanic Panic” in the form of abuse charges brought against child-care workers and suburban parents. Today, the author joins a group of Satanists for afternoon tea at the church’s global headquarters in a “bland New York college town.”

A profile of long-time White House butler Eugene Allen. This article served as inspiration for the recent movie “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”

A comic who had previously refused to discuss his private life opens up for the first time, riding high on the surprise success of Blazing Saddles more than thirty years into his career.

Thirty-three years ago, a Chicago man was sentenced to death for murder. In 1999, another man confessed to the crime. Today, they are both free.

The police told Lara McLeod to report her rape. Then they arrested her for lying.

Searching for a ghost of Meyer Lansky’s Cuba, a sex-show star who quietly disappeared from the island and was later immortalized in The Godfather Part II.

When we form our thoughts into speech, some of it leaks through our hands. Gestures are thoughts, ideas, speech acts made tangible in the air. They can even, for a moment, outlive the speaker.

What hand motions can teach us about language, ethnicity and assimilation.

Nobody knows the full story of why legendary surfer Andy Irons died in a Dallas hotel room earlier this month. But some who knew him have come forward to discuss the demons he’d battled for years.

How a serial killer and his teenage accomplice used listings for “the job of a lifetime” to lure their victims, all down-and-out single men, to the backwoods of Ohio.

To his friends and family, Ross Ulbricht was a compassionate, warm soul known for random acts of kindness. To the F.B.I., he was Dread Pirate Roberts, the mastermind behind the Silk Road who was willing to order hits to protect his black market operation.

One of Europe’s poorest countries wanted a road, so U.S. mega-contractor Bechtel sold it a $1.3 billion highway, with the backing of a powerful American ambassador. Funny thing is, the highway is barely being used—and the ambassador is now working for Bechtel.