“The whole thing has a sort of Taylor Swift-meets-jihad feel.”

On the underground economy of full-service Southern California apartment complexes marketed to Chinese birth-tourists.

The struggles of Xavier University, a tiny, historically-black school in New Orleans, to train students for medical school.

Winona Ryder has always been trapped in her own anticipatory nostalgia, and the public has always wanted to keep her there.

The definitive story of a ubiquitous software. PowerPoint’s origins, its evolution, and its mind-boggling impact on corporate culture.

A 12,000-word profile of recently departed Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva, the “most successful politician of his time.”

Early last year, 10 churches were torched in East Texas. The culprits? Two Baptist teens having a crisis of faith.

An interview with Heart guitarist and film composer Nancy Wilson.

How automated ‘execution algorithms’ are taking the world’s markets on a wild ride that few economists can even understand, much less control.

A campaign diary of Luther Campbell’s (better known as Dr. Luke of 2 Live Crew) run for Mayor of Miami-Dade County.

A profile of the hard-living, cop-dodging artist Dash Snow, published two years before his death of an overdose.

An essay on poetry and madness.

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else.

What it means to become a superpower while three quarters of the population lives on less than fifty cents per day—four scenes from India in transition.

The making and near unmaking of Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakout film.

A professor of sociology at Columbia reckons with her father’s relationship with Adolf Eichmann.

The theme-park chain where kids learn to pilot a plane, pay taxes, and pretend to be adults.

Seth Rogen, Amy Pascal, and the inside story of Sony’s hacking saga.

For decades a group of radical Catholics, many of them nuns, have been keeping up the good fight against nuclear weapons.

Many people hoped that this would be the second book she’d publish.

Notes from a never-finished biography of the neurologist, humanist and writer.

The author visits City of Refuge in Pahokee, Florida, a community of more than 100 registered sex offenders.

The multimillionaire David Gundlach had trouble, all his life, reading social cues. For reasons no one quite understands, he left most of his fortune to Elkhart, Indiana.

On stolen bicycles, “a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves.”

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone work.

After two people are found dead in Yellowstone National Park, a team of investigators tracks down the unlikely culprit: a grizzly bear.