When Putin suggested to Obama that the White House and the Kremlin speak through an intermediary, he named who he thought was the obvious candidate: his friend Steven Seagal.

How the Mosley Motel, off U.S. 19 in Florida, became the temporary home to at least 27 families turned away from full shelters.

In July 2008, the director of a Denver non-profit received a package containing house keys, a will, a $100,000 check and what appeared to be a suicide note. She didn’t go to the bank–or to the cops.

War stories from the world of Manhattan real estate, written during an era when everybody knew the Internet would completely change the business and nobody quite knew how.

When one of the best young chemists in the world took his own life, Harvard was forced to reconsider the relationship between PhD students and their (often Nobel Prize-winning) advisers.

George Lois never actually worked at Esquire, he simply designed the most iconic magazine covers of the 60s as a moonlighting gig while revolutionizing (and, generally pissing off) the advertising industry by day.

Born into Sea Org; a diary of a misspent youth (and adulthood) in the service of Scientology. “One of the first things I learned in the Sea Org, because I was a receptionist, was how to handle process servers.” (25,000 words)

When Conan O’Brien left NBC, he agreed to stay off TV for months and stay quiet about the network and its executives. The agreement contained no mention of social media, however. On the origins of a digital renaissance.

The American medical establishment has gone to extraordinary lengths—some of which read like conspiracy theory—to discredit the notion (and its most visible promoter, Dr. Atkins) that carbohydrates, not fat, are the cause of obesity. It looks like they were wrong.

A profile of Travis Kalanick, who resigned from the ride the ride-hailing company he built after leading it to the brink of implosion.

The members of Girls Travel Baseball come from all over the country, compete against boys, and aim to prove they can play in the major leagues.

Inside the Vice President’s gamble on Donald Trump.

A review of several books on Rupert Murdoch first criticizes the authors for not grasping the many sides of their subject, then offers a thesis of its own. He’s “not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a portrait of the modern world.”

Over eight years, through millions of letters, the staff of the White House mailroom read the unfiltered story of a nation.

At 18, Katie Stubblefield lost her face. At 21, she became the youngest person in the U.S. to undergo the still experimental procedure to get a new one.

The President received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.

A car crash in Kentucky left a 13-year-old girl dead. A Sudanese refugee was charged with her killing. The story of the trial that followed.

Two years ago, the climbing photographer known as Nathan Smith saw no way out, after struggling for years with gender-identity issues in the male-dominated outdoor industry. Then—slowly, bravely—Nikki introduced herself to the world.

The story of a young man from rural Ghana who bought a pair of secret camera glasses and got himself smuggled across the Sahara, to film crime and exploitation along the way.

The author’s then-six-year-old ended up with the original artwork for one of the cards in Magic’s Alpha series—but he’s not selling, so don’t even ask.

“After receiving a trove of documents from the whistleblower, I found myself under surveillance and investigation by the U.S. government.”

On the people who will be sent back to a place they’ve never called home if DACA runs out.

On the Capitol assault.

Some people may treat the appearance of a Confederate flag as another bit of absurdity, but I’ve never had the luxury of taking it in any way other than literally and seriously.

Why psychologists love “priming.”

How the city will drown.