Life in Mosul.

ISIS vs. the Kurds.

Life with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.

In 1959, a social psychologist in Michigan brought together three institutionalized patients for an experiment:

[W]hat would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?

On Patti Smith.

It was easy for lazy journalists to caricature her as a stringbean who looked like Keith Richards, emitted Dylanish word salads, and dropped names—a high-concept tribute act of some sort, very wet behind the ears. But then her first album, Horses, came out in November 1975, and silenced most of the scoffers.

Yearning for conception.

“From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades.”

An interview with Rachel Dolezal.

On Edgar Ray Killen.

Remembering Amy Winehouse.

On a transition and its aftermath.

The case for paying college athletes.

Educating the TikTok generation.

Jorge and Carmen Barahona are awaiting trial. Both are charged with murder. The Department of Children & Families, which received numerous calls about Nubia to its child abuse hot line but did not protect her, has been flagellated for failure to do its job. That is the story of Nubia Barahona’s death. This — from voluminous court records, audio recordings, hundreds of family photos released by prosecutors, interviews and DCF documents — is the story of her life.

In the early 1960s, the paranoid Hoffa asked Chuckie to buy thousands of copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and distribute them to union locals around the country. “Some of these poor guys, the only thing they knew was how to drive a truck or work at a warehouse,” Chuckie told me. “They didn’t have the knowledge of the electronic shit. Mr. Hoffa wanted them to read that book and said that this is what’s going to happen to not only us but to everybody—and exactly what he’s predicted has happened.”

Shanghai, in 1989 and 2013. Excerpted from A History of Future Cities.

“If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you’re right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you’re also right.”

A reporter who investigated Scientology tracks down the man who once ran the church’s intelligence operations – and who may hold the secret to years of harassment (and the mysterious death of a pet dog).

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

After nearly 15 years in a Peruvian prison, an American woman convicted of aiding a Marxist terrorist group finds parole in Lima full of contradictions.

Peter Zumthor, who recently won the Pritzker Prize after a career of few buildings and mostly modest-in-size projects, on the “architecture of actually making things”

On secrets that surprise no one:

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

On the London riot on 2011, which “tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out.”

How a town of 29,000 on the Hudson River came to be “one of the most dangerous four-mile stretches in the northeastern United States.”