“How do you catch someone up on your entire life?”

The story of a Pacific Palisades con man named Jeffrey Lash.

Kurdish revolutionaries helped the U.S. expel the Islamic State from its capital city. Will we soon abandon them?

A walkout mostly failed to secure more funding for schools, but it has spawned a movement of politically engaged Okies.

Dick Cavett, the “last great intellectual talk-show host,” at 81.

Inside a sleazy FBI sting involving diet clinics, fitness models, money laundering, and a supposed plot to hire a hitman.

When her brother embraced Orthodox Judaism, the author began to question her own reality and went to Israel to find some answers.

How the state’s “restitution program” forces poor people to work off small debts.

How the the rush to direct-selling platforms like OnlyFans could change the adult industry forever.

How the waters off of LA became a DDT dumping ground.

Our climate models could be missing something big.

As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.

A group of high school students try desperately to make it through an isolated and dire year.

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, New York’s schools remain separate and unequal.

The apparatus of counterinsurgency and occupation has funneled billions of dollars into Afghanistan, and much of it has ended up in the hands of insurgents. For those who have profited—be it through aid, extortion, corruption or legitimate business—there is very little incentive to bring the conflict to an end.

Gang-bang buffet tables, deeply earnest 'Letters to the Editor,' ghost-writing Kierkegaard references into model bios in Barely Legal, and how a half-decade of reviewing porn eroded the thin line between the author's alter egos and self.

From 1976 to 1986, one of the most violent serial criminals in American history terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and might still be out there. The author, along with several others, couldn’t stop working on the case.

Shortly before leaving Goldman Sachs, Sergey Aleynikov downloaded around 32mb of source code from their high-frequency stock-trading system. Even as he was sent away for an eight year bid in federal prison, no one seemed to fully understand exactly what he did.

One reason the Tea Party's patriotic political statements are so taupe is that they mirror the religious rhetoric, which is high on generalizations about God and low on nuance and complexity and conflict. Go ahead, replace "constitution" and "patriotism" with "God" and "faith" in some tea party speech sometime—it's not as wacky as it should be.

A first-person account of an arrest:

I stared at the yellow walls and listened to a few officers talk about the overtime they were racking up, and I decided that I hated country music. I hated speedboats and shitty beer in coozies and fat bellies and rednecks. I thought about Abu Ghraib and the horror to which those prisoners were exposed. I thought about my dad and his prescience. I was glad he wasn’t alive to know about what was happening to me. I thought about my kids, and what would have happened if they had been there when I got taken away. I contemplated never flying again. I thought about the incredible waste of taxpayer dollars in conducting an operation like this. I wondered what my rights were, if I had any at all. Mostly, I could not believe I was sitting in some jail cell in some cold, undisclosed building surrounded by “the authorities.”