A profile of 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, the newly crowned Miss America.

An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.

On Sam Jain and Daniel Sundin, the fugitive kings of scareware.

On the tangled early careers of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr and Jeffrey Eugenides.

The Starbucks-fueled saga of how Jim Romenesko, beloved journalism blogger, took an early retirement.

A step-by-step proposal for fixing the broken economics of big-time college sports.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

A Yale student on why nearly a quarter of her classmates will end up working for Wall Street.

A tech reporter tells the story of his ruined digital life.

The truncated, violent lives of Richard Matt and David Sweat before their prison escape.

Why “the legal equivalent of outer space” continues to exist, fifteen years after 9/11.

Five of the sixteen women speak.

The inside story of how Yahoo’s C.E.O. lost her way.

How a French journalist recruited a posse of Brazilian parking lot attendants and pizza-delivery guys and created Hollywood’s most addictive entertainment product.

The mother of a child born with a deformed brain responds, heartbreakingly, to an academic study claiming that people are happier without kids.

Tony Judt on sex, the academy, and dating a graduate student while chairing NYU’s History Department.

Ten years ago, Esquire did a piece about Harvard Law grads who had eschewed their degrees. One of them was the late comedian.

A quasi-oral history of the party that was JFK’s 1961 inauguration.

The story of Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian teen-ager who travelled to Syria to fight with radical Islamists.

At 33, Wendy Brown stole her daughter’s name, grabbed a pair of pom-poms, and went back to high school. Then she went to jail.

“These, I now know, are the details of how my mother died..:”

Disillusioned with fine dining, one of the world’s great chefs took on fast food. It has been harder than he ever imagined.

Investigating the disappearance of a trans teen who hasn’t been seen since 2012.

The inside story of how an Ivy League food scientist turned shoddy data into viral studies.

How Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed Liberty University, one of the religious right’s most powerful institutions, into a wildly lucrative online empire.