An essay on craft, excerpted from Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

An interview with Steve Albini on art, commerce, and ethic.

An interview with New Yorker critic Alex Ross about his book The Rest is Noise and why there’s really no such thing as “classical music.”

In 1906, Enrico Caruso was arrested for molesting a young woman inside the Monkey House of Central Park Zoo, paving the way for the first celebrity trial of the 20th century.

Kansas City’s most powerful political journalist is a 36-year-old blogger who resides in a porn lair in his mother’s basement, posting rants on local government and bikini shots 24-hours-a-day.

“There are no good options. But some are worse than others.”

Hollywood is aggressively adapting material that doesn’t have a narrative or even any characters. But not all intellectual property is created equal.

Tyler Haire was locked up at 16. A Mississippi judge ordered that he undergo a mental exam. He would wait 1,266 days in an adult jail.

A late night host finds a new voice.

A bitter legal row over a mosque in an affluent New Jersey town shows the new face of Islamophobia in the age of Trump.

“It’s not like I told myself, okay, this is it, you’re gonna take the guy outside and throw him off the goddam boat.”

Omar Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002. He was held in Guantanamo for years without charges. He was tortured. And earlier this month, after nearly 13 years behind bars, he was released on bail.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

In the poorest congressional district in the country, where thousands of people are arrested each year, one former cop with a complicated past made high-profile cases fall apart by insisting that the ends justified his means.

California has more charter schools than any other state. But the way they’re overseen is flawed—and questionable operators are making millions.

For a century, the humble paper towel has dominated public toilets. But a new generation of hand dryers has sparked a war for loo supremacy.

A profile of Jenny Offill, whose latest novel addresses climate collapse.

One cyclist rides west, another rides east. They meet on an empty stretch of road in a Kazakh desert.

His savvy on a longboard earned him trophies. His burglary of the Natural History museum in New York earned him headlines. And his brutality on a Florida boat 50-odd years ago earned him a lifetime in prison. Now: What does penance get you?

The Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct for 20 years. Here, his alleged victims tell their stories.

An eccentric Dutchman began living in a giant underground facility built by the German military—and ran a server farm beloved by cybercriminals.

The Mews, a father-son team of orthodontists, have an unusual theory about the source of crooked teeth — one that has earned them a following in some of the darker corners of the internet.

“The cowboy hats, target practice, and barbecue brisket were just a bonus. They were really there for the deregulated electrical grid.”