BARR: What makes you laugh? BERNHARD: Well, it's really a myriad of things, but usually it's something that's very organic. It's something that happens on the street. BARR: Like fat people falling down? BERNHARD: No, no . . . [laughs] BARR: That really cracks me up. It's terrible.

A profile of the hardworking Samuel L. Jackson, whose movies have grossed more than any actor’s ever.

Twenty-one-year-old Briton Lucie Blackman came to Tokyo and found work in the Roppongi district hostess bars, where businessmen come to flirt with paid companions, and Western women draw a premium fee. Two months later, she disappeared. She would be found underneath a bathtub in a beachside cave.

John MacNeil was convicted by the state of Massachusetts of second-degree murder. He was given a life sentence. He escaped. He was caught. Through an incredible feat of jailhouse lawyering, he somehow got himself paroled and exiled to Canada. Then he came home.

In need of a new lead singer, Journey settled on an unknown 40-year-old from the Philippines whose clips they found online. Arnel Pineda was perfect: just a small-town boy, living in a lonely world.

Since he could speak, 8-year-old Brandon has insisted that he was meant to be a girl. This summer, his parents decided to let him grow up as one.

Refugees arriving in the U.S. after receiving asylum face challenges that have led some to return to their war-torn homelands.

A DHL tycoon’s small plane disappeared near the Phillipines amidst rumors of children fathered with teenage Asian villagers. Every scrap of his DNA went missing, but that didn’t stop a forensic mathematician.

How a London con man turned a struggling painter into a master forger, sold more than 200 fakes, and exposed the art industry as its own worst enemy.

Jay-Z on his new book Decoded, his parents’ record collection, and the real reason rappers have a tendency to grab their junk on stage.

Anatomy of an international incident; how three idealistic young American hikers wandered across the Kurdistan-Iran border and ended up in Iranian prison charged with spying.

How the relationship between favela-based drug gangs and elite police units tasked with fighting them came to define Rio de Janeiro.

An essay on clothing in uncertain times.

“If a life can have a crystallizing moment, for Jim Graham that 1993 meeting was it, discovering that his father might have been a Catholic priest, rather than John Graham, the distant man who raised him with scarcely a kind or comforting word.”

On Amaka Osakwe and life as a woman in Lagos.

A son’s love letter to his sick mom.

Ida Wood, who lived for decades as a recluse in a New York City hotel, would have taken her secrets to the grave—if her sister hadn’t gotten there first.

When her son was sentenced to 25 years for Brooklyn’s 2003 “grid kid” slaying, Doreen Quinn Giuliano was sure he’d been wrongfully convicted. To prove it, she went undercover, testing her sanity, her marriage, and the justice system.

“Yeah, okay, listen. It’s Sy Hersh. Who the f— do you think I am? Your f—ing wife? What do I look like to you? Your f—ing brother-in-law?”

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s new movie, inspired by Gerhard Richter, blurs the line between fiction and biography. Richter says that it goes too far.

Interviews with a receptionist, a factory worker, and others about life on the job.

With state legislatures passing new abortion restrictions, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund follows its own compass on how to best help clients.

The M.I.T. Media Lab knew Epstein was a convicted sex offender. They asked for his help anyway, then covered their tracks.