Tereza Sedgwick trains to become a nurse aid, the fastest-growing job in America. It pays just better than minimum wage and has one of the highest burnout rates of any career.

He was just another coked-up agent (repping the likes of Steven Soderbergh) when he disappeared into Iraq, shooting heaps of footage he would attempt to package into a pro-war documentary. And that was just the beginning.

Many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. And at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.

It’s been 46 years since she gave her famous commencement address at Wellesley. What she was trying to say then—that politics is personal, that she believes in human connection above all else—she is trying to say again in 2016. Maybe she’s been trying to say it all along.

At a high-profile Libertarian conference, everyone agrees government should be smaller, but what should replace it is much more contested.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

A segregated housing development washed away in a flood can still explain why Portland, Oregon, is such a “white” city.

For most people who participate in clinical trials, being a guinea pig is just a way to make a quick buck. For others, it’s a career.

Pat Gallant-Charette is 68. She’s on a quest to beat marathon swimming’s globe-spanning challenge.

One writer travels to “La Serenissima” and finds that time is no match for Venice’s magic.

Kathy Phipps was “rescued” by FEMA. Ten years later, she is so anxious she’s confined to her house.

In 1995, Ramirez allegedly raped Patricia Esparza. He was tortured and killed weeks later. Now she’s charged with his murder. Is she responsible?

An independent pawn store stumbles along in an economically depressed Pennsylvania town.

An essay on its history and future during a time when “gayness, we are told, is over.”

“At first, there is only a little sound, a metallic ping, almost a click.”

Online startups can send you pills to cure anxiety. But is it safe to buy them?

Covid allowed Raquel Esquivel and 4,500 others to be released from overcrowded federal prisons. So why is she back behind bars?

James Allen is serving three life sentences for murder. No one ever said he killed anyone.

An essay on poetry and madness.

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else.

They listened to the radio until there was nothing more to do. Philip went into the house and retrieved a container of Kraft vanilla pudding, which he’d mixed with all the drugs he could find in the house—Valium, Klonopin, Percocet, and so on. He opened the passenger-­side door and knelt beside Becky. He held a spoon, and she guided it to her mouth. When Becky had eaten all the pudding, he got back into the driver’s seat and swallowed a handful of pills. Philip asked her how the pudding tasted. “Like freedom,” she said. As they lost consciousness, the winter chill seeped into their clothes and skin.

Thomas Pynchon walks down a New York City street in the middle of the morning. He has a light gait. He floats along. He looks canny and whimsical, like he'd be fun to talk to; but, of course, he's not talking. It's a drizzling day, and the writer doesn't have an umbrella. He's carrying his own shopping bag, a canvas tote like one of those giveaways from public radio. He makes a quick stop in a health-food store, buys some health foods. He leaves the store, but just outside, as if something had just occurred to him, he turns around slowly and walks to the window. Then, he peers in, frankly observing the person who may be observing him. It's raining harder now. He hurries home. For the past half-dozen years, Thomas Pynchon, the most famous literary recluse of our time, has been living openly in a city of 8 million people and going unnoticed, like the rest of us.

The writer contemplates beauty and identity following reconstructive surgery.

There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected just how omnipresent are our own images. I began by merely avoiding mirrors, but by the end of the year I found myself with an acute knowledge of the reflected image, its numerous tricks and wiles, how it can spring up at any moment: a glass tabletop, a well-polished door handle, a darkened window, a pair of sunglasses, a restaurant’s otherwise magnificent brass-plated coffee machine sitting innocently by the cash register.

The anatomy of a 1930 epidemic that wasn’t:

Was parrot fever really something to worry about? Reading the newspaper, it was hard to say. “not contagious in man,” the Times announced. “Highly contagious,” the Washington Post said. Who knew? Nobody had ever heard of it before. It lurked in American homes. It came from afar. It was invisible. It might kill you. It made a very good story. In the late hours of January 8th, editors at the Los Angeles Times decided to put it on the front page: “two women and man in Annapolis believed to have 'parrot fever.'"

Inside the lack of an investigation into Florida State Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston.

Did Thomas Pynchon write a series of letters to Northern California newspapers under the pseudonym “Wanda Tinasky”?