“The case of Lisl Auman, who first wrote me from prison three years ago, is so rotten and wrong and shameful that I feel dirty just for knowing about it, and so should you.”

How a 26-year-old cocktail waitress ended up running a private weekly poker game for some of Hollywood’s highest rollers.

The life and times of James McClintock, the man behind the famed H.L. Hunley who also may or may not have faked his own death.

A woman reels in the wake of her mother’s absence.

A profile of Thelonious Monk.

Scenes from a local bar in winter.

“They thought they were going to change the world,” he says of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project volunteers. “They didn’t expect that white folks would be so vicious.”

A story of bird and human patterns.

“The squirrels may take my tomatoes and spit them back, but they would not go unanswered. The time had come to close the circle of life.”

She lives in a world called Calalini with an invisible companion named 400-the-Cat; inside the life of a six-year-old with schizophrenia.

Separated from his older brother at a train, five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan found himself lost in the slums of Calcutta. In his 20s, living in Australia, he began his search for his birth home armed with nothing but hazy memories and Google Earth.

“For every other kid in the room, the science experiment probably amounts to just another classroom activity, but for the Nashes the project is a reminder of Molly’s own fight for life and the controversial cutting-edge medicine that saved her.”

How social psychologist Diederik Stapel committed and rationalized an audacious academic fraud, and what his lies reveal about the culture of scientific research.

On the holy city of Canudos, and other attempts at better living “by the dispossessed and marginalized the world over.”

On Japanese writer Gengoroh Tagame, who creates gay manga work “in the artistic tradition of Pasolini, de Sade, Yukio Mishima and Lolita.”

In an old mine an hour north of Pittsburgh, 600 federal employees manage paperwork for the government’s retirement system. By hand. On paper. Without computers. The same exact way they always have.

Last summer, when she thought nobody was looking, Mary Bale put a cat in the trash. The act was caught on video, and Bale was quickly tried and convicted online. The aftermath of a viral crime.

The 20 soldiers in Second Platoon try in vain to hold down a strategic outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, “among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces.”

In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently in a storm dumping a load of plastic floatee toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—to the open sea. This is their story.

Before the guru, Prakashanand Saraswati, vanished in March—before a jury convicted him of sexual abuse; before he slipped across the border into Mexico overnight—he led the premier Hindu temple in Texas and, perhaps, the whole United States.

A profile of Rick Santorum published early in his final campaign for the U.S. Senate, a race widely considered a stepping stone to the White House before he lost.

By day, Dan Brown runs the seafood counter at SuperFresh. By night, he does his life work: clearing, dressing, and sharing road-killed deer.

Two pairs of identical twins mismatched in a hospital happen upon each other in their twenties.

She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world. Then she said they were in love.