A profile of California congressman Darrell Issa:

A few days after we met in Las Vegas, Issa called me. He was concerned about all my questions regarding his early life and didn’t see why they were newsworthy. The conversation was awkward.

A profile of twenty-seven-year-old James O’Keefe, who came to national attention during the last election after his prank videos stung ACORN and Planned Parenthood. A subsequent attempt to bug Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones resulted in jail time for O’Keefe.

At a dinner party, the author meets one of Afghanistan’s last remaining maskhara — an entertainer, thief and murderer.

A conversation with the former first lady five years into her life as a widow.

Growing up among the tall waves and schoolyard bullies of Hawaii.

How Yvette Vickers, a B-movie starlet who had appeared in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, ended up mummified in her Los Angeles home last year.

BARR: What makes you laugh? BERNHARD: Well, it's really a myriad of things, but usually it's something that's very organic. It's something that happens on the street. BARR: Like fat people falling down? BERNHARD: No, no . . . [laughs] BARR: That really cracks me up. It's terrible.

A profile of the hardworking Samuel L. Jackson, whose movies have grossed more than any actor’s ever.

In need of a new lead singer, Journey settled on an unknown 40-year-old from the Philippines whose clips they found online. Arnel Pineda was perfect: just a small-town boy, living in a lonely world.

How the relationship between favela-based drug gangs and elite police units tasked with fighting them came to define Rio de Janeiro.

At 37, Brian Wallach was diagnosed with the fatal disease. So he tapped a lifetime of connections to give help and hope to fellow sufferers—while grappling with his own mortality.

When Jennifer Farber disappeared in 2019, suspicion immediately centered on her husband and press coverage almost exclusively painted her as a missing suburban mom. But reducing the 50-year-old’s life to a familiar tabloid trope missed so much of her story.

A year of isolation made me consider all the casual, unwanted touch women endure — and why it’s so hard to refuse it.

Doc was a medical student in his 40s, but he spent his nights with the teenagers who hung around his San Antonion apartment complex, buying them drugs and booze. The first time he asked one of them to ritualistically kill him, they laughed it off. He would ask again.

Steven Seagal spent a few years in Japan and  returned to open a dojo in L.A.. Jules Nasso was the wiseguy producer behind all of Seagal’s hits. When it all fell apart, Seagal reputedly offered money for a contract killing, and Nasso may have been caught on tape arranging to extort Seagal through the Gambino Family.

Breslin’s unflinching and devastating investigation of the porn industry in Los Angeles would be at home in many an excellent magazine. But Breslin didn’t go that route. Instead, she built a custom site that presents the story with her photographs and design.

-A. Madrigal

A look at Andy Warhol’s enduring popularity and power in the art market.

Warhol’s art was not supposed to be a matter of emotion, introspection or spiritual quest; it was to be an image, pure and simple. “During the 1960s,” he wrote knowingly in 1975, “I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.”

A two-week island experience involving a 70-year-old interloper, his mannequin girlfriend, a couple of dogs and very little else.

On the railways of China and a trip aboard its latest spectacle, a $32 billion line carrying passengers between Shanghai and Beijing at 170 MPH.

On July 22, 2013, 66-year-old Gerry Largay began hiking a 32 mile section of the Appalachian Trail. She hasn’t been heard from since.

After a Chinese immigrant couple were charged in their daughter’s death, supporters say they’re vulnerable targets of the American justice system.