Taking the measure of the president, with a view to history.

The events leading up to the botched execution of Clayton Lockett.

The plight of the uninsured in a red state.

The unsolved mystery of the soldier who died in the watchtower.

On the insane business of bottled water.

A history of the celebrity profile.

The life and death of the racehorse Secretariat.

The true story of the first Thanksgiving.

The legacy of the Guatemelan adoption industry.

"I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don't think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts."

On February 25, 1969, Bob Kerrey led a raid into a Vietnamese peasant hamlet during which at least 13 unarmed women and children were killed.

A review of several books on Rupert Murdoch first criticizes the authors for not grasping the many sides of their subject, then offers a thesis of its own. He’s “not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a portrait of the modern world.”

On the history, internal culture, and scandals of the consulting giant.

The plot to erode the key legislative gains of the civil rights era.

Inside the world of “Wooks,” the loner-craftsmen behind the coming marijuana-concentrate boom.

The crowdfunded phone of the future was a multimillion-dollar scam

The mysterious death of Alfred Wright in the shadow of a town’s history of racial violence.

The barbaric brutalization of Abner Louima and the tragic fate of a handful of flawed Brooklyn cops.

More than 15% of Detroit’s adults have asthma, and 82% of black students go to schools in the most polluted parts of the city.

The highest-ranking CIA officer to be convicted of spying passes the tricks of the trade along to his son.

An hour-by-hour account of the explosion and rescue effort on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

A friendship born out of the ruins of a nation, a dangerous journey home, and a 40-year search for the truth.

In Sinaloa, Mexico, women recover the bodies of missing loved ones—and cook to keep their memories of the dead alive.

A profile of law professor Dan Kahan, “one of the best-known unknown academics in the country,” who wants to close the communication gap between scientists and the public.

A profile of Mitch Landrieu, the first white mayor of New Orleans in nearly 30 years–part of a larger post-Katrina trend in the city’s politics. “The elected leadership looks almost like a photo negative of the pre-Katrina government.”

How Rupert Murdoch’s empire of influence remade the world.