Looking for answers while camping with an abusive father.

Has global warming made it harder for environmentalists to care about conservation?

A trip to India for total silence.

A 1993 profile of Ricky Jay, world-class sleight-of-hand conjurer who rarely performs (and never for children), historian of unusual entertainments and confidence scams, bibliomaniac.

A profile of Nora Sandigo, guardian to hundreds of kids born in America to illegal immigrants.

A profile of 25-year-old Lena Dunham, showrunner and star of HBO’s Girls.

The disappearance of the mysterious “Pakistani asset” that helped the CIA zero in on Bin Laden.

The first article in a two-part history of the Educational Testing Service, the institution behind the SAT.

The original article that inspired the movie Spotlight.

A visit to the ‘Castle’ where self-driving cars learn.

The pharmaceutical quest to give women a better sex life.

Ending homelessness is really quite simple: give people somewhere to live. Why’s Utah the only place willing to try it?

What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth.

The writings of Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik are a copy-and-paste hodgepodge of “jeremiads against the scourge of cultural theory, lists of atrocities perpetuated by Muslims, and pages of derision of ‘female sluts,’ but also Wikipedia articles about sugar beet farming and investment tips.”

Full six-part series on the rise and fall of Viktor Bout, the most notorious arms dealer of the modern era.

A brief history of churchyards, cemeteries, and the ghosts that haunt them.

For more than a decade, the employees of a Washington think tank were traumatized by an unlikely harasser: a career Foreign Service officer. In hundreds of emails and voicemails, he called them “Arab American terrorist murderers” and ranted about how they should be cleansed. Yet there was almost nothing they could do.

A history of a small Texas town deep in the Chihuahuan desert:

The isolation is such that if you laid out the islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, and the deep ocean channels that separate them, on the road between Marfa and the East Texas of strip shopping and George Bush Jr., you’d still have 100 miles of blank highway stretching away in front of you.

Investigating a pilot’s choice and the death of 217 people.

On the business of selling books.

Zaranj: the bloody border of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The main characteristic of Diane was courage.”

How the Library of Congress failed to adapt to the 21st century.

On the evolving design and industrialization of the American outdoors.

Analysis of the trial from future Supreme Court justice.