Michael Quinn took on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and lost.

The legendary artist has radically upended his distinctive style of portraiture—and his entire life. Why?

The life history of an unassuming Sudanese man, Noor Uthman Muhammed, who has spent the last nine years in Guantánamo Bay prison.

Jeremy Wilson spent years crisscrossing the country and inventing new identities as a war hero, an MIT grad, a Hollywood journalist, and more.

The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?

Why dealing with the IRS is so difficult – and the woman charged with making it easier:

[Nina] Olson noted that the IRS relied on computers to audit all but the highest-income brackets. “We’re getting to a situation where the only people who will get face-to-face audits are the 1 Percent,” she said. “For the majority of taxpayers, the IRS has become faceless, nameless, with no accountability and no liability.”

A longtime Harper’s contributor considers America as he dies: “When I died, I died of many things: the failing systems; the weakening of age; the exhaustion of the long war against dying. Finally, I succumbed to the lack of ethics in a California hospital, killed by filth and neglect.”

“The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.”

How pop-up tax preparers make billions off the poor.

On PredictIt, a site that allows you to bet on politics, and the people who are getting rich off it.

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work.

A profile of Gina Rinehart, the richest person in Australia.

On the talent, ego, and late father of Bryant Gumbel.

A footnoted inquiry into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.

Tracking down the very best in Grateful Dead concert concessions.

A profile of Henry Hook, the world’s best crossword puzzler, who died this week.

On the “horrible weirdness” of Kim Jung Il’s Korea.

On JFK and the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

The life and work of a Manhattan psychoanalyst.

A former first-string tackle considers the green zone as a war zone:

Just as football has evolved in accordance with the evolving business ethic of American society, so has it evolved in accordance with the changing strategic assumptions about war. The development (or rebirth) of the T-formation in football coincided almost exactly with the development of a new era of mobility and speed in warfare best exemplified in the Blitzkrieg tactics of the German armies in Europe in 1939-40. The T-formation soon overwhelmed the “Maginot Line” mentality of traditional football, based as it was on rigid lines and massive concentrations of defensive and offensive power.

Twenty-six years after he was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife, Michael Morton sees the real killer brought to justice in a Texas courthouse.

NSA-grade spyware is up for sale, and the world’s worst dictatorships are buying.

Alaska brims with stories of people who vanish and are given up for dead. Once in a while, the dead return.

The dramatic imbalance in pay and power has created the conditions for abuse.