Lily gets ready for her first date.

L’Wren Scott went from bullied Mormon teen to international model to Hollywood stylist to fashion designer, becoming Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the process. In March, she took her own life.

“The Jihad route leads from Tunisia via Tripoli into Turkey and on to Syria. Thousands have followed the path into Syria, and only a few have returned.”

Twelve columns about the boxer’s descent, originally published in the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends didn’t realize what he’d done until they saw his image on television.

How did a pair of young rappers from Scotland, laughed off the stage for their accents, land a deal with Sony and start partying with Madonna? They pretended to be American.

An excerpt from Night of the Gun, the memoir by New York Times media critic David Carr about his years as a junkie in late-‘80s Minneapolis.

In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.

Through a series of interviews and historical inquiries, Errol Morris dissects Anosognosia, “a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.”

There is someone whose job it is to try to extract royalty money from anyone who plays music in a place of business. Most people do not react well to this request.

A Barclays analyst leaves for a routine laser treatment and is never heard from again. Ten months later, authorities find her body under a concrete slab at the house of her doctor, who was in fact not a doctor at all.

In Torreón, north of Mexico City, cartel gunmen are freed from a prison, commit a massacre at a wedding that includes the band, and then return to custody.

Or, the perils of promoting a middle schooler’s basketball skills. An excerpt from Play Their Hearts Out.

Yes, 311 helped solve the mysterious case of the maple syrup smell. But with the data from more than 100 million calls, it’s primed to explain far more.

During WWII, a bomber crashes into the Pacific and the crewmen begin an epic battle against dehydration, exposure, and endless attacks by sharks. Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

Unruly teens from around the world are kidnapped by parental order and sent to ‘behaviour-modification centers’ like Tranquility Bay, a $40,000/year prison-like compound in Jamaica.

From the 1940s through the early 70s, incoming freshman at Harvard, Yale, Vassar, Wellesley, and several other top schools were photographed nude in the name of science–bogus science, as it turned out. Most of the photos were destroyed, but not all.

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.

What has Ted Haggard, who left the New Life megachurch after admitting he purchased crystal meth and sexual favors from a male escort, been doing in the four years since? Selling insurance door to door and then… founding a new church and returning to the pulpit.

A grandmother from Chicago, she’s one of those people who knows everybody. And those people who know everybody, the connectors, make the world work. A study of the power of (offline) social networking.

“The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side.”

Paul Gayle wants to raise his daughter, but he needs a job and a home. What he gets is 16 lessons on fatherhood from the Obama administration.

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

The aftermath of a childhood filled with subway flashers, teachers who asked for hugs, and boys who joked about your breasts.

The Darién Gap is a lawless wilderness on the border of Colombia and Panama teeming with everything from deadly snakes to antigovernment guerrillas. For many migrants, crossing it is their only way to get to America.