One of the most valuable cars in the world crashes going 200 mph on the Pacific Coast Highway. Its owner claims to be an anti-terrorism officer. In fact, he’s a former executive at a failed software company—and a career criminal. The unraveling of an epic con.

Pete Dexter, profiled.

"I'm sick and tired of the story," says Dexter, though he knows it is a signature moment of his trajectory from newsman to writing some of the most original and important novels in American literature, including the National Book Award–winning Paris Trout (1988), a riveting tale of an unrepentant racist who brutally murders a 14-year-old black girl in a small Georgia town in the late 1940s. Settling deep into a dark-green leather chair near a patio window that offers a commanding view of ferries chugging across the cold blue waters, Dexter begins: "It was not a good column. I was trying to write something I didn't feel." Dexter is referring to the column that almost got him killed.

Rosie grew up in a succession of decrepit houses in South London with one man and a rotating cast of women, who claimed that they had found her on the streets as an infant. The man, Aravindan Balakrishnan—Comrade Bala, as he wanted to be called—was the head of the household. He instructed the women to deny Rosie’s existence to outsiders, and forbade them from comforting her when she cried.

“It is a story that seems almost impossible to believe: a group of female convicts, few of whom had ever played a musical instrument or taken voice lessons, forming a country and western band and becoming, at least in Texas, the Dixie Chicks of their day.”

A group of misfit boys from the fringes of Las Vegas form a clique. Then, with murky motives, they decide to murder one of their own and bury him in a desert pit.

Alan Beaty’s Tennessee farm serves an unofficial halfway house for Marines struggling with their return to civilian life.

Live from Kingston for Frazier vs. Foreman.

An interview with a man who organized suicide bombings for ISIS.

Reckoning with what is owed—and what can never be repaid—for racial privilege.

Things go terribly (and illegally) wrong at a rehab center for well-off L.A. teens.

No, but for security software companies it’s a useful fiction.

Why carbon credits for forest preservation may be worse than nothing.

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.