A profile of 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, the newly crowned Miss America.

An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.

On Sam Jain and Daniel Sundin, the fugitive kings of scareware.

On the tangled early careers of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr and Jeffrey Eugenides.

The Starbucks-fueled saga of how Jim Romenesko, beloved journalism blogger, took an early retirement.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

A tech reporter tells the story of his ruined digital life.

The truncated, violent lives of Richard Matt and David Sweat before their prison escape.

Why “the legal equivalent of outer space” continues to exist, fifteen years after 9/11.

Ten stories on guns, ranging from competitive shooting, to girl gangs in Chicago, to the sisters and mothers of mass shooting victims.

Five of the sixteen women speak.

The inside story of how Yahoo’s C.E.O. lost her way.

The everyday violence of some urban neighburhoods in America takes its own emotional toll.

Karaoke renditions of ‘My Way’ have led to murders in the Phillipines.

How a French journalist recruited a posse of Brazilian parking lot attendants and pizza-delivery guys and created Hollywood’s most addictive entertainment product.

Tony Judt on sex, the academy, and dating a graduate student while chairing NYU’s History Department.

A profile of Rahm Emanuel, written during his first congressional campaign in Illinois. Emanuel was running to fill the seat vacated by Rod Blagojevich.

Ten years ago, Esquire did a piece about Harvard Law grads who had eschewed their degrees. One of them was the late comedian.

Where the actual online money is centralized, and where Google will have to go to continue chasing it.

A quasi-oral history of the party that was JFK’s 1961 inauguration.

The story of Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian teen-ager who travelled to Syria to fight with radical Islamists.

At 33, Wendy Brown stole her daughter’s name, grabbed a pair of pom-poms, and went back to high school. Then she went to jail.

The story of a newscaster’s suicide.

On a mysterious migrant in a San Diego hospital bed, and the thousands of families who hope that he’s theirs.

Disillusioned with fine dining, one of the world’s great chefs took on fast food. It has been harder than he ever imagined.