The government says Matt DeHart is an online child predator. DeHart—and his parents—say he’s being framed over his knowledge of CIA secrets.

As the city is transformed by gentrification and inequality, comedies have begun depicting it as a place of magical connection.

Three years after a devastating wildfire, a California community faces another crisis: PTSD. Is what’s happening there a warning to the rest of us?

Two lawyers, a summer of unrest, and a bottle of Bud Light.

Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

It’s the furthest artificial intelligence has come. And while the supercomputer may get attention for competing on Jeopardy!, Watson could also change everything from customer service to emergency rooms.

In a nondescript office park in suburban Florida, a company you’ve never heard of is making a product that few people have ever seen. And it has $1.4 billion in funding.

Merriam-Webster is revising its most authoritative tome for the digital age. But in an era of twerking and trolling, what should a dictionary look like?

At a South Korean laboratory, a once-disgraced doctor is replicating hundreds of deceased pets for the rich and famous.

Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus got cancer—and then accidentally shared his diagnosis with the public over social media. Turns out getting sick renewed his faith, healed his old friendships, and reminded him what makes life worth living.

An ethnography.

The Interstellar director and the art of the blockbuster cult film.

A history of the Hollywood publicity racket.

In an era when America’s great sportswriters were as big as the athletes they covered, W.C. Heinz may have been the best of the bunch.

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

A “reckless” fracking company, poisoned springs, and a family forced to buy water at Walmart.

How the tiny town of Roundup, Montana became a hub in Amazon’s supply chain.

Adventures in bartending.

Growing old at the Playboy Mansion.

The golfer at his nadir.

A statistics-based argument that drug pricing, not drug use or law enformencement, is the only way to predict swings in violent crime rates.

When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there.

“It is not so difficult to get Paul McCartney to talk about the past, and this can be a problem. Anyone who has read more than a few interviews with him knows that he has a series of anecdotes, mostly Beatles-related, primed and ready to roll out in situations like these. Pretty good stories, some of them, too. But my goal is to guide McCartney to some less manicured memories—in part because I hope they'll be fascinating in themselves, but also because I hope that if I can lure him off the most well-beaten tracks, that might prod him to genuinely think about, and reflect upon, his life.

And so that is how—and why—we spend most of the next hour talking about killing frogs, taking acid, and the pros and cons of drilling holes in one's skull.”

Retirement for chimps is, in its way, a perversely natural outcome, which is to say, one that only we, the most cranially endowed of the primates, could have possibly concocted. It's the final manifestation of the irrepressible and ultimately vain human impulse to bring inside the very walls that we erect against the wilderness its most inspiring representatives -- the chimps, our closest biological kin, the animal whose startling resemblance to us, both outward and inward, has long made it a ''can't miss'' for movies and Super Bowl commercials and a ''must have'' in our laboratories. Retirement homes are, in a sense, where we've been trying to get chimps all along: right next door.

The former editor of the New York Observer, profiled.