The lives of Sue and Hector Badeau, who felt a calling to raise children and adopted twenty of them.

A profile of Mike Judge, creator of the now-resuscitated Beavis and Butthead.

How the death of a Muslim recruit revealed a culture of brutality.

A profile of California’s governor at the end of more than 40 years in public life.

The many lives of Josh Tillman, who on the way to releasing one of the year’s best albums was “a defiant child of God, a broke dishwasher, a successful drummer, a Dionysian shaman, a failed poet, a drug-hoovering spiritualist, and a gleeful prankster.”

On gray.

Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel. Which means it’s incredibly valuable. Which means biomedical companies are bleeding 500,000 crabs a year. Nobody knows quite what that means for the crabs.

For centuries, dowsers have claimed the ability to find groundwater, precious metals, and other quarry using divining rods and an uncanny intuition. Is it the real deal or woo-woo?

“There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them—but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.”

On America’s relationship with the right to bear arms, from the Founding Fathers to the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan.

Learning to live in Earth’s coldest conditions.

His rise to the top of the Billboard charts coincides with a list of criminal charges, including domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and aggravated battery of a pregnant woman.

The story of a lynching in rural CO in 1900, while hundreds watched, done with the complicity of press and cops, and why it still resonates today.

A profile of “America’s most vulnerable comedian.”

What good can come of tragedy.

A tale of wealth and rebellion in East Hampton.

A profile of Zooey Deschanel.

A profile of celebrity astrophysicist Neil Tyson.

Reviewing Newt Gingrich as historian and intellectual.

Life inside a pair of small-town boarding houses.

December 1944, Auschwitz.

It’s one of our most in-demand natural resources, and it’s running out.

A leading sci-fi writer takes stock of China’s global rise.

A profile of a new icon.

They were the New York crew that once pulled off the Lufthansa heist, one of the biggest thefts in American history and the basis for Goodfellas. Nearly 40 years later, most are dead. The survivors are old, broke, and snitching.