Michel Houellebecq on his controversial new novel, Submission, which imagines France electing its first Muslim president.

A baby dies after hitting his head when his father drops him, and the investigation that ensues can’t offer any easy answers.

The young people fighting for democracy will be back.

After an election deadlock that held the country hostage for months, two former rivals confront Afghanistan’s patronage and corruption.

The writer Alfred Chester, who died alone in a Jerusalem apartment in 1971 at just 37, was brilliant. He was also insane.

Squeamish though they might be about God, even the totally irreligious can find some comfort in praying.

Typee, the most popular book Melville published in his lifetime, was his memoir of Polynesia. Most of it was probably made up.

An unexplainable murder, double jeopardy, and military courts: the strange case of Tim Hennis.

On the difficult challenges faced by an auteur in Nigeria’s burgeoning Nollywood film economy.

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.”

A college president on the bizarre experience of being informed by NBC News that he had hired a war criminal to teach French.

Brian Hickey, a journalist who was induced into a coma after being left for dead following a hit and run accident, reports the story of his recovery.

An interview with Greil Marcus on the songs of Van Morrison and why people are afraid of imagined things.

The bloody, often surreal, fight for Kosovo’s independence was led by a man moonlighting as a roofer in Switzerland.

A Holocaust detective story: could a lampshade pulled from the ruins of Katrina really be Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?

How misdirected incentives in the bewildering medical supply industry keep innovative, life-saving equipment from reaching hospitals.

Why did a veteran BBC on-air personality confess on camera to a mercy killing he did not commit?

You watch your best friend jump off a bridge trying to end his life. What do you do? Vino Richemond jumped in after him.

What it takes to recover from a near-death brawl with a bear.

The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.

How a burst blood vessel transformed the mind of a deliberate, controlled chiropractor into that of an utterly unfiltered, massively prolific artist.

Tackling the science of cooking, one perfect french fry at a time.

"The honesty in Perfume Genius’s music has attracted him a devoted audience, and he receives a lot of messages on Twitter from young kids going through the process of coming out, or dealing with their own addictions. “I think people come to my music just to feel less lonely,” he says. “When I write, sometimes I think, What would I have liked to have heard when I was younger?” But on his new record, out this May, he aimed for something a little more developed: essentially, he wanted to make a grown-up album about life after you’ve trudged through the trauma."

Wags Lending and the brave new world of of financing in “niches where we’re dealing with emotional borrowers.”