The West Virginia senator reaps big financial rewards from a network of coal companies with grim records of pollution, safety violations, and death.

A 22,000-word breakdown of Kubrick’s “odyssey portraying the span of millennia.”

The dissolution of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng’s marriage amidst evidence of her affairs with Tony Blair and Eric Schmidt.

A memory of interviewing the late great songwriter Townes Van Zandt shortly before his death.

From a small Ohio town to Afghanistan, a portrait of the perpetrator of a massacre.

How group of misfits in Texas including Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings snubbed Nashville and brought the hippies and rednecks together. An oral history of outlaw country.

[Part 1 of 2] The story behind this spring’s spate of retributive murders in Southwest D.C.

On a book of photographs shot by Leni Riefenstahl in the 1950s and 1960s depicting an African tribe.

How the culture of academia helped Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama scientist who murdered colleagues during a faculty meeting, fall apart.

How three friends and a team of frat brothers made a fortune smuggling people along the most heavily patrolled stretch of highway in Texas.

A profile of philosopher Timothy Morton, who wants humanity to give up some of its core beliefs.

The rise of Mike Pence’s chief of staff Nick Ayers and what it reveals about post-Citizens United politics.

A profile of Christine Quinn, odds-on favorite to be the next mayor of New York City.

Reverse engineering the details of a murder that took place in St. Louis on Christmas Night in 1895 from over a century of popular song.

The legacy of a secret Cold War program that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers.

Eighty percent of North American teenagers are in the care of an orthodontist. On our obsession with perfect teeth.

He had the mind of a scholar, but he always insisted he didn’t want to be one.

Typee, the most popular book Melville published in his lifetime, was his memoir of Polynesia. Most of it was probably made up.

A Holocaust detective story: could a lampshade pulled from the ruins of Katrina really be Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?

The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.

How a burst blood vessel transformed the mind of a deliberate, controlled chiropractor into that of an utterly unfiltered, massively prolific artist.

Wags Lending and the brave new world of of financing in “niches where we’re dealing with emotional borrowers.”

Despite what dementia has stolen from the cerebral creator of Deadwood, it has given his work a new sense of urgency.

The story of an aviator-adventurer draws a journalist into a reflection on his own family’s history of flight.