On Alaska’s North Slope, village schools aim to blend book learning with the Arctic reality.

They have lost five years of life expectancy and no one knows why.

A profile of the NFL quarterback gone bust.

A voting rights march, from Selma to the statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama.

A few days in the life of Miley Cyrus.

Frederick Douglass and the specter of slavery in Talbot County, Maryland.

Ending a pregnancy in the most “pro-life” state in America.

The death of a Russian dissident and how radioactive poison became a tool of assassins.

The riotous private sector life of former New York senator, Al D’Amato.

An ambivalent look at Google Glass, the “Model T of wearable computing.”

The complicated process of ghostwriting Julian Assange’s autobiography.

What really happened in the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion?

A son interviews his mother about language and love in the South.

The Bitcoin ghostwriter who wasn’t.

James Reston’s problematic proximity to the powerful.

An artifact from the era when MySpace was king.

An oral history of the Playboy Clubs.

An essay on gynobibliophobia and the critical reception of women writers.

Inside the twisted, litigious world of software patents.

Less than half a decade after The Hills brought them massive celebrity, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are broke and his living in his parent’s vacation house. Their onscreen relationship was mostly fake, but the reality, as their current situation attests, was far worse:

By the end of 2009 (and the show’s fifth season), their lives seemed insane. Instead of riding bikes, Spencer was holding guns. Heidi’s plastic surgeries gave her a distorted quality, but she vowed to have more. Spencer grew a thick beard, became obsessed with crystals, and was eventually told to leave the series. There were daily updates on gossip sites about them “living in squalor,” publicly feuding with their families, and attacking The Hills producers (or claiming The Hills producers attacked them). By the time they announced they were (fake) splitting, followed by Spencer threatening to release various sex tapes, and Heidi (fake) filing for divorce, it seemed like they had ventured into, at best,Joaquin Phoenix-like, life-as-performance-art notoriety and, at worst, truly bleakStar 80 territory that could end with one or both of them dead.

A profile of Barry Bonds published as the steroid talk intensified.

Why has the White House ignored clemency petitions?

On the U.S. immigration prison-industrial complex.

On the LAPD’s decade-old cold case division: its detectives, its tactics, and its successes.