The women would walk 10 miles from the village to the meat packing plants. Their pay supported drunk husbands and hungry children. When they were told to stop, they broke with tradition and went to the law.

On the trail of a group of thieves stealing the fanciest wine out of San Francisco’s fanciest restaurants.

An $140 million blockbuster written and funded by a billionaire, ‘Empires of the Deep’ was supposed to be China’s ‘Avatar,’ featuring mermaids, Greek warriors, pirates, sea monsters, and an even international stars.

Six years after being filmed, the movie has never seen the light of day.

“We’re the fucking establishment now. You and I. We’re not…” the young red hat, encircled by his squad, pantomimed the old establishment with a swaying, limp-wristed dance. “We won. Fuck them.”

How Carl Foreman, while tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee, turned a throwaway Western into an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist.

“I had inherited a Rolodex full of useful phone numbers (the College Board, a helpful counselor in the UCLA admissions office), but the number I kept handing out was that of a family therapist.”

The Mews, a father-son team of orthodontists, have an unusual theory about the source of crooked teeth — one that has earned them a following in some of the darker corners of the internet.

Inside the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, the first Covid-19 hot spot in the U.S., where 46 people associated with the nursing home died.

The soul of an octopus.

On the Susan B. Anthony List, the anti-choice power broker:

In a year when 11 women are running for the U.S. Senate, including six pro-choice Democratic incumbents, the efforts of a group founded by second-wave feminists, named for a first-wave feminist, could once again be a major force in reducing female representation in Congress.

The changing landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans:

There have been sightings of armadillos, coyotes, owls, hawks, falcons and even a four-foot alligator, drinking from a leaky fire hydrant. Rats have been less of a problem lately because of the stray cats and the birds of prey. But it’s not just animals that emerge from the weeds.

Harland Sanders left home when he was 13. He once gunned a man down in the street for painting over one of his signs. During the war, he fed the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And then, in his 60s and going by the moniker Colonel Sanders, he began selling fried chicken.

“Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.”

Exploring the depths of the abalone black market.

Scenes from the California drought.

The cost of Alzheimer’s.

The Wikipedia origin story.

On the public schools of Detroit.

The story of an imam convicted on a suspect terrorism charge and the place he was sent: a jail in the Midwest where nearly all of the prisoners are Muslims.

The racist foundation of Oregon.

A father, his dying son, and the quest to make the most profound video game ever.

“Easy care” sheep, crushed piglets, and starving calves. These are the products of a remote research center where scientists are trying to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry.

A trip to the writers’ room of The Onion spinoff, which started as a BuzzFeed parody but has morphed into something else: “the institutional voice of the Internet.”

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.

On the shifting nature of time.