What it was like to edit The New Republic at its most contentious.

One of the little tweaks I made the first time I got the job was to change the slogan on the table of contents from “A Journal of Politics and the Arts” back to the original: “A Weekly Journal of Opinion.” All the fine reporting notwithstanding, what The New Republic did best, had always done best, was opinion. Its politics were polemical, its art was the art of argument.

The evolution of cheating in chess.

The tormenting of Wen Ho Lee.

The allure of invisibility.

How the actor ended up with a house full of tourniquets and syringes, an unflinching belief in the restorative powers of “ozone,” and the brain scan of someone who has “experienced the equivalent of blunt trauma.”

The end of a marriage.

"And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music".

A profile of the California governor.

The state of the American cockfight.

Investigating the world of “belly torture.”

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past

Meditations on the myth of the voiceless.

On spending six months on the southern coast of Argentina with the “Jane Goodall of penguins” and several hundred of her research subjects.

On Norman Bel Geddes, pioneer of miniatures and maker of the “most iconic World’s Fair exhibit of all time.”

With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.

Remembering the loss of a parent and the birth of an addiction.

On the 1866 murder of Laura Foster and the subsequent hanging of Tom Dula.

Creating – and revising – the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

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.

The soul of an octopus.

A day in the economic life of the Nairobi’s Kibera, the largest shanty-town in Africa.

The inside story of how the U.S. missed the 2018 World Cup.

A profile of Beck on the eve of his new album and nearly 20 years after the release of “Loser.”