The sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship.

How an island in the Antipodes became the world’s leading supplier of licit opioids.

The economic reality behind a billion-dollar wellness craze.

On the life and legacy of Canadian artist Matthew Wong.

Is the oldest person who ever lived a fraud?

Frankie Manning was the greatest swing dancer alive. Then the world forgot about him.

A profile of the candidate 100 days from the election.

The perils of voting in the modern age.

Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system.

The city through the eyes of a four-year-old.

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

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.

How the Jesuit Church refused to stop pedophile priest:

"He truly is the Hannibal Lecter of the clerical world. He did more psychological and physical damage to children than anyone else. And what makes it worse is that the Jesuits knew about it, and did nothing."

The racist foundation of Oregon.

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.

The few who got to view Jerry Lewis’s notorious The Day the Clown the Cried, set at Auschwitz, piece together memories of their surreal personal screenings.

A young reporter heads to Colombia to report on the conflict between FARC and the paramilitaries. He meets a girl on the bus. After they begin a relationship, she reveals that that she is part of a death squad.

In an elaborate FBI sting to expose corruption, four agents pose as futures traders in Chicago. The plan works–if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars the agents lost in the process.

The writer and his girlfriend move to the Dominican Republic, joining the rapidly expanding community of expats who claim to have found paradise. They promptly get robbed at gunpoint. To cope, he investigates the country.