What would drive a man to stand outside the Vatican embassy nearly every day for 14 years?

What is the sickness that leads inhabitants to sleep for days?

How a celebrated American artist was forced to trade his multimillion-dollar collection for a job selling donuts.

For years, Mormon Mommy blogger Natalie Lovin curated a picture-perfect life. Then she left the church—and her husband.

Justin Alexander went searching for higher meaning. No one expected the quest to end in a search for his body.

The story of the 1944 German national soccer championship game.

The neurologist explores the mystery of hallucinations.

On the rise of witness intimidation in Baltimore.

The rise and fall of “America’s most exciting black scholar.”

A broke agent hustles on the extreme fringe of pro basketball.

“He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world.”

A meditation on the “out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant.”

On the legacy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Inglewood rapper has survived the death, deportation, and displacement of his family and friends.

“This is a story about an entertainer named R. Kelly. It is a story about the remarkable, but also very strange, pop talent he has. It is a story about the difficult places he came from and the ways they may, or may not, have shaped who he has become. It is also the story of a man who has been publicly accused of multiple sexual offenses with underage women, and who stood trial for making child pornography. He was eventually acquitted of that charge, and his career has continued uninterrupted, but for the most part he has evaded even the most basic questions that might help people understand what is true about him. For this story, R. Kelly agreed to speak about his whole life without restrictions.”

A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.

Did A.Q. Khan sell nuclear secrets on the black market? The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West—an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role.

The lonely death of a godfather of the conspiracy theory movement.

The beginnings of the best-selling video game, from a chapter of David Kushner’s new book on the subject.

The island of Borneo is the only home of the proboscis monkey, an endangered primate that is surprisingly resilient.

The remarkable stories of the nine other women in the Harvard Law class of ‘59.

One famous critic (Adler) takes another (Pauline Kael) to task for a collection of reviews that is “without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

Buddy Cianci, former Providence mayor and convicted felon, is running for the city’s top office. Again.

The story of H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer.

The sole survivor of a 1966 shipwreck tells his tale.