A dispatch from the pandemic under Governor Kristi Noem.

A former student and high school coach travel to California to kidnap the coach’s daughter, an adult film actress.

The United States fights wars it can’t win using soldiers it doesn’t know.

How Google’s utopian/dystopian plan to scan the world’s books failed and the Harvard-led team that’s picking up the pieces.

The underground routes by which drugs enter the U.S. from Mexico, and the officials who’ve found it almost impossible to curb their construction.

The Hollywood backroom machinations that got the biopic to movie screens.

Novelist Brad Thor thought he had found his doomsday-prepping soulmate, but then the End Times went bad.

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.

“And while maybe you don’t care if Justin Bieber ever does make his way back to a kind of normalcy, perhaps you can admit there is at least something admirable, in the abstract, about someone finding a way to survive, and even to become kind, when all they’ve been taught since a young age, by millions of adoring people, is that there is no need for them to be kind at all. And if that doesn’t move you, then maybe you can at least find sociological interest in the process that Bieber is about to recount here, which is how you turn into someone you don’t want to be, and what you do about it once you decide you want to be someone else. Someone better, even.”

Jamie Leigh Jones’s story of gang-rape in Iraq changed the law to help victims, even though she might not have been one herself.

A jailhouse interview with Vladimir Putin’s rival at the very end of his decade behind bars.

We devote vast resources to intensive, one-off procedures, while starving the kind of steady, intimate care that often helps people more.

“No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.”

On the death of NBA star Reggie Lewis.

But not for want of programmers trying.

A profile of author William T. Vollmann.

The story of heiress Huguette Clark, who spent her life avoiding people and collecting dolls.

During her brief tenure as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin was a genuinely effective, bipartisan legislator. What went wrong?

The story of a Marine who saved innumerable lives, then got fired.

Researchers do look into near-death experiences, seeking a verified case of what they call “apparently non-physical veridical perception.”

Revisiting the 6200 block of Osage Avenue.

On the death of a high school basketball star in New York City.

The story of a bizarre—and bizarrely effective—smear campaign.

The reclusive director comes out of his shell at 73.