A cautionary inquiry into the unchecked hive mind.

The artists are leaving San Francisco.

Murky origins. Feuding chefs. How the lobster roll went national.

An optimistic argument for the United States.

On the trail with the convicted felon and would-be Mini Trump.

The two poets correspond about basketball, life, and living.

A months-long interview with the singer-songwriter.

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba; the U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes. The truth is more complicated.

Sexual harassment. Hate speech. Employee walkouts. The Silicon Valley giant is trapped in a war against itself. And there’s no end in sight.

In a speech that’s getting a bit of flak for recycling some of his past lines, the stage- and screenwriter says it’s okay to make mistakes along the way:

And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You're a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You're barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they're a-coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

He was an itinerant preacher who claimed god have revealed him to be the one true prophet. He kidnapped Elizabeth Smart  and lived with her in a makeshift camp for years. She was hard to find; not because he was sly, but because Utah is full of prophets with multiple young wives.

The comedian on his show business bucket list, Donald Sterling, and whether he ever feels guilty for being funny.

She keeps watch over one of the largest databases of missing persons in the country. For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

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).

The Piano Man of Yarmouk fled the ruins of Damascus to a life of criss-crossing Germany playing songs about his old neighborhood to huge crowds. Because of refugee law, he is paid nothing.

The rise and fall of Lisette Lee, the self-proclaimed “Korean Paris Hilton,” who was busted for drug trafficking.

The writer reconnects with an old acquaintance who ten years earlier committed one of the most notorious crimes in New York history.

The social rituals of the pansexual, bi-queer, metroflexible New York teen.

The story of Southern Flight 242.

The wealthy widow of an East Bay newspaper baron, her cowboy fantasy man, and the drowning nobody could solve.

An uneasy friendship forms in colonial Ceylon between the future husband of Virgina Woolf and a socially repulsive police magistrate.

On how a childhood spent in New York City’s tenements led a 15-year-old boy to be convicted of murder.

A first-hand account of San Francisco in the hours and days after the devastating 1906 earthquake.

Inside the empire of Botox.