In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for starting a fire that killed his three daughters. The case hinged on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Johnny E. Webb. Today, Webb says he lied.

Like hundreds of other local slaves — [they] had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

In 1983, I wrote an article about sex and disabled people. In interviewing sexually active men and women, I felt removed, as though I were an anthropologist interviewing headhunters while endeavoring to maintain the value-neutral stance of a social scientist. Being disabled myself, but also being a virgin, I envied these people ferociously

‘‘Just imagine what it was like to be him,’’ Walton added. ‘‘It was 50 years of him being 18 inches taller than everyone and having the brain that he had. Imagine being this jazz head coming up during black power. This is just a dude who has a different head.’’

A visit to Albania to watch Henry Marsh perform his pioneering surgery where the patient is kept awake during the removal of a tumor and the “brain is stimulated with an electric probe, so that the surgeon can see if and how the patient reacts.”

On literary tourism:

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real.

An interview with John Waters.

Real life is seeing and art is looking. If you’re successful, it’s a magic trick: you take one thing, and you put it in here, and it changes in one second, and then you can never look at that thing again the same way. That is what art is to me.

The macabre, ultra-violent plays put on at the Grand Guignol defined an era in Paris, attracting foreign tourists, aristocrats, and celebrities. Goering and Patton saw plays there in the same year. But the carnage of WWII ultimately undermined the shock of Guignol’s brutality, and audiences disappeared.

A team of researchers at Columbia believe that small changes to college life could make campuses safer.

There’s a tale about a boy in Waycross. Near a canal, he struck a match, lit a piece of newspaper, and tossed it into the water. But when the burning paper touched the surface, it didn’t go out. The water burst into flames.

“Morning and night the hordes of clerks and stenographers and business men who fill the offices of down-town New York have poured across Newspaper Row and City Hall Park with scarcely a glance at the labor progressing underfoot that is going to bring them so many minutes nearer their work in the morning, and at night so many minutes nearer their play.”

How one billionaire owner outflanked two others and brought the NFL back to Los Angeles, doubling the value of his franchise.

Wayne Simmons was ideal conservative commentator. A former C.I.A. operative, he ate lunch with Donald Rumsfeld, took trips to Guantánamo aboard Air Force Two, and pumped the party line on Fox News. There was only one problem: Simmons had never been in the C.I.A.

The changing landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans:

There have been sightings of armadillos, coyotes, owls, hawks, falcons and even a four-foot alligator, drinking from a leaky fire hydrant. Rats have been less of a problem lately because of the stray cats and the birds of prey. But it’s not just animals that emerge from the weeds.

For at least 130 years, cabbies in London have been taking what many believe is the hardest test in the world: through a series of oral exams that takes four years to complete, they must prove that know every one of the city’s 25,000 streets, every business and every landmark.

Of the 4.5 million Syrians who have fled their nation’s bloody civil war, fewer than 3,000 have made it to America. This is one family’s story.

Two years after she sued producer Dr. Luke, saying he had drugged, raped, and emotionally abused her, Kesha is still bound to her original recording contract. She owes $100,000 (conservatively) per month on legal bills and can’t release any new music.

The president of the Philippines’ kill list is reputed to have over million names of supposed drug pushers and addicts, including many mayors and politicians. There is no reliable way to get off the list other than dying in a hail of bullets from assassins on motorbikes.

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

The film is a rare portrayal of black people in our fullness—angry and frightened and hurt, euphoric and loving and free.