The possibilities and limits of investigative reporting.

A love triangle between two married professors and the dean goes public.

Everything that happened before former NBA star Lamar Odom suffered multiple strokes on the floor of a Pahrump brothel.

For decades, airlines failed to turn a profit despite having a monopoly on the sky. This year they’re expected to make billions. Here’s why.

The ongoing question of forgiveness in Charleston, where Dylann Roof opened fire in a church on June 17th.

The Straters’ lives have been devastated by relentless cyberattacks. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

An account of the 60 minutes after a heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden that left one boxer with permanent brain damage.

Telephone poles began to appear around the same time that white Americans started lynching black Americans.

How a 63-year-old country singer went from a Nashville homeless shelter to #1 on the Swedish charts in under a year.

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?