How a once idyllic postwar town fell under the sway of a teen-age gang.

“Neither of my parents was exactly who I thought they were.”

What the author learned about himself from Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth.

The making, and marketing, of a 9-year-old meme machine.

The psychology behind our limitations of reason.

A dark journey Into the world of a man gone wild.

A grandmother’s tale of the night her first love had to leave town.

The origins of a misplaced panic.

On Kara Walker.

Three nights with 311 in the waning moments of free American life.

On the death of a major league pitcher and its aftermath.

A trip to the “Olympics of hairdressing” with Team USA.

Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?

The life and mysterious death of dissident Bulgarian writer and radio journalist Georgi Markov.

How Curtis Duffy overcame his parents’ murder-suicide to become one of the nation’s great chefs.

The murder of an Olympic champion and the autopsy that shook a city.

Memories of living with the writer Andrew Lytle late in his life.

A conversation on the “bedeviling sorts of indeterminacies one encounters the deeper one drills.”

Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, cocaine, and the making of The Blues Brothers.

On the journey of 24-year-old Jose Fernandez, the Cuban defector turned Major League all-star, who died Sunday.

A long stroll through a Staten Island cemetery leads to the story of the 19th-century free-black oystermen who settled Sandy Ground.

Forty years after the dirty wars and Pinochet’s coup, photographer David Burnett journeys back to Chile to visit the subject of his most famous image.

A profile of Avishek Sengupta, who drowned at the Walk the Plank obstacle during an endurance race last year.

Did the Obama Administration ignore evidence that someone other than Assad could be behind the sarin attacks?

A profile of computational biologist Eric Schadt, the guy who’s figuring out what comes next after the Human Genome Project.