The 79-year-old actor, too creaky to get off the couch, interviewed at his palatial Florida mansion about love, fame, and how he’s in okay financial shape despite the fact that a surveyor is taking measurements of his house as he speaks.

“'You have to understand: This is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get a hold of yourself.' And I was like someone who’d lost her mind: 'But I love him! I love him!' He’s sleeping, and I’m whispering: 'I love you!' Walking in the hospital courtyard, 'I love you.' Carrying his sanitary tray, 'I love you.'”

An unlikely friendship bloomed in Oxford, Mississippi between a 30-year-old drug dealer and a college-bound teen after a chance meeting at a hotel pool. Then the dealer began to suspect that his friend was one of the 30 or so confidential informants that Metro Narcotics recruits from around the college town each year.

From Vallejo to San Jose, a tour of local government despair:

The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis.

More Lewis: the complete financial disaster tourism series to date.

In 2016, a West Virginia police officer came upon a young man in distress who asked the officer to shoot him. The officer didn’t. A few minutes, another officer did. Only one of them lost their job.

In the late 1960s, a German named Günther Hauck disappeared in Brazil. When he emerged, he was calling himself Tatunca Nara and claimed to be the chief of the Ugha Mongulala, an previously unknown Indian tribe. Since then he has lived in the Amazon, his legend growing. Jacques Cousteau hired him as a guide. An Indiana Jones movie was based on his stories. And three people who made pilgrimages to see him never came home.

When your house is the set of One Tree Hill:

On one shoot, I remember, I'd been confused about where they needed to set up (confession: hungover), and as a result neglected to clean the bedroom. Later, a crew guy—the same one who'd told me about Blue Velvet—said, "I'm not used to picking up other people's underwear." I felt like saying, Then don't go into their bedrooms at nine o'clock in the morning! Except… he was paying to be in my bedroom.

An essay about artificial intelligence, emotional intelligence, and finding an ending.

By the time I got access to the model, it was late July, 2020. In the fifth month of quarantine, having recently moved home to face my teenage journals, I wasn’t sure if I missed talking to strangers or to Omar. But I wanted to know if, with enough prodding, I could turn GPT-3 into either, or at least convince myself that I had.

The landmark article that changed the way communities were policed:

This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one"- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order—is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.

A prolific fundraiser and dean at St. John’s University, Cecilia Chang was also accused of murdering her husband and had connections to organized crime. Two days after she was convicted of stealing more than $1 million from the schoool, she took her own life.

Of the 4.5 million Syrians who have fled their nation’s bloody civil war, fewer than 3,000 have made it to America. This is one family’s story.

Three months before it all started, she'd been a shy sophomore at Aurora Central High School, a member of the soccer and speech teams. Then Randy Miller had come out of prison and back into her world. A 22-year-old former child prostitute and drug dealer, Miller had promised to take her away from a tumultuous and painful home life. But the journey he had in mind led downward, into a terrifying series of home invasions and armed robberies and, finally, a few hours after the King Soopers stickup, to a standoff with state troopers in a small Kansas town.

“Tiffany Haddish may, in fact, be too good at being Tiffany Haddish. Too good at seeming like one of your friends who became famous. At times, she treats her new fame like she is on a group text with the world.”

The artist discusses her latest record, Biophilia, science and music education. 

Up until she developed a vocal-cord nodule a few years ago, Björk made a point of not investigating how that instrument worked. “With arrangements and lyrics,” she says, squinting over her coffee, “I work more with the left side of my brain. But my voice has always been very right brain. I didn’t try to analyze it at all. I didn’t even know until I started all this voice work, two years ago, what my range was. I didn’t want to let the academic side into that—I worried the mystery would go.”

Jai Alai once packed Florida’s frontons with gamblers and glamor. Today, America is down to a single top-level pro who plays under the name Tevin in honor of Tevin Campbell.

To understand why a 64-year-old man would try and break the land speed record by traveling hundreds of miles per hour, you need to know a little something about his family.

A dispatch from Donetsk.

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

A profile of Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Published originally in GQ Russia.

On Luddites, “bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry,” and their literary spawn.

The controversial history of WI-38, a cell strain created from an aborted fetus “that has arguably helped to save more lives than any other created by researchers.”