His wife murdered his mother, tried to do the same to him, and was prepared to orphan their 8-month-old child. The attempt left him blind. Then he defended her in court.

How the Taliban reestablished itself as both a “quasi government” and a military force, and what that success means for the Pentagon’s plan to pass responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014.

On who will bear the burden of the financial crisis facing cities across America. “Will it be articulated in terms of bond defaults or larger kindergarten classes—or no kindergarten classes at all?”

Jay Miscovich spent his life wanting to hunt for treasure. In 2010, after just a few months of trying, he found half a billion dollars worth of emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic. A few years later he killed himself.

They believe that strangers on the street watch them, follow them in vans, whisper as they pass. Their family urge them to seek help. Then they find people online who have experienced the same thing they have.

The Medallion Fund, a computer-driven hedge fund open to only 300 people, has produced about $55 billion in profit over the last 28 years. Almost nobody knows how they have done it.

A visit with John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing, which “changed the way at least two generations responded to art,” just before his death.

As one of the Angola 3, he was in isolation longer than any other American. Then he came home to face his future.

Life after the sugar sphinx.

Over the past 15 years, three people have attempted to restore the humor brand to its former glory. What happened instead was direct-to-video movies, lawsuits, crippling debt, and two prison sentences.

Fred Steese served more than 20 years in prison for the murder of a Vegas circus performer even though evidence proved he didn’t do it. When the truth came to light, he was offered a confounding deal: he could go free, but only if he agreed to remain a convicted killer.

Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old White House advisor, became steeped in white nationalism in the unlikeliest of places: a Santa Monica high school and Duke University.

“I learned about sex in a Laundromat. The setting wasn’t my idea. It was my mother’s who had brought me along on washday to break the news.”

On the relative plausibility of impossible beings.

What happened to “one of maybe 20 girls who became famous in the mid-‘00s for posting photos of themselves on image boards.”

A Ugandan bill that would threaten homosexuals with imprisonment, or in some cases death, has its roots in the shadowy American evangelical group known as The Family.

Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a basketball legend on the Quinault Nation reservation, was 20 when he was mowed down by a white man in a pickup truck. The decision not to charge a hate crime, and recent talk of a plea deal, has re-opened ancient wounds.

In America’s deadliest big city, the task of announcing each new murder falls to police spokesman T. J. Smith. One year ago, he confronted a killing like no other.

In more than a decade of arguing cases in court, I’ve witnessed the stubborn cultural biases female attorneys must navigate to simply do their jobs.

He was 8 years old, and the signs of abuse were obvious. Yet time and again, caseworkers from child-protective services failed to help him.

On Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The Booker Prize-winning novelist on fantasy, reality, and a religious crisis that has never ended.

How Trumpism operates on the knowledge that some people can get away with anything, and how it offers a false promise to extend that privilege to white kids everywhere

Ankle bracelets are promoted as a humane alternative to jail. But private companies charge defendants hundreds of dollars a month to wear the surveillance devices. If people can’t pay, they may end up behind bars.

Once the bright young hope of the Latin-American left, Alan García was caught up in an epic corruption investigation.