Jaroslav Flegr and his theory about Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in cat feces:

If Flegr is right, the "latent" parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, "Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year."

What happens when a wealthy patron wears out his welcome in the “strangest, most conflicted place in all of Texas”?

Two people went for a hike on the Appalachian Trail. Only one made it out.

Being pregnant again means being willing to end it.

A tony bedroom community in Los Angeles, a kidnapping gone horribly wrong, and the birth of a teenage fugitive.

On life in Los Angeles, and the specter of a second riot.

What happened to one of the most hated basketball players in NCAA history after playing a single season at Georgetown.

Doug Dodd was a drug kingpin in high school. And now, like the narrator of a Scorcese film, he wants to tell his own story.

The residents of Colorado Springs undertook a radical experiment in government. Here’s what they got.

A growing body of research suggests that trees can communicate and cooperate in the wild.

“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own ­aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know ­whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”

“Football as we know it is done, because the lawyers are here.”

An ode to the Bee Gees' strange, successful career.

How America’s first serial killer terrorized the city of Austin on Christmas Eve, 1885.

Jane Neubauer was just out of basic training when a secretive military unit recruited her for an undercover mission. She and the Air Force disagree about what happened next.

Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

Smell is often dismissed as the least important sense. But it’s the funk that draws us together.

The author boards the Costa Atlantica for several days of line dancing, burlesque and buffets as part of the cruise industry’s new foray into China.

A profile of the goat-herding nationalist intellectual who is leading a movement.

On the master palindromist, Barry Duncan.

The tables have been turned – brutally – on Qaddafi loyalists.

The neck-and-neck race that electrified the 1982 Boston Marathon.

The anatomy of a scandal.

Overcrowding in prisons leads to doubling up inmates in solitary confinement, regardless of their homicidal intentions or mental health.