On the plight of indigenous suicide in Alaska.

The story of one of the great final acts in sports history.

“We know we down in this shithole together.”

A Bad Boy coaches in the WNBA.

On the epidemic of deaths in jails.

Giving birth as a black woman in America.

A profile of the youngest Black woman in Congress.

When the author’s wife was dying, his best friend moved in.

“There is no hierarchy in the web of life.”

How reading can lead to resilience in the most trying times.

A first-person account of the author’s time spent volunteering with a group of Burmese activists in Thailand, who turn out to be not Korean but in fact Karen, members of Burma’s persecuted ethnic minority. In the course of her time there, they show her videos of their risky forays across the border, and she shows them MySpace.

In the 1880’s, a shabbily dressed man popped up in numerous America cities, calling upon local scientists, showing letters of introduction claiming he was a noted geologist or paleontologist, discussing both fields at a staggeringly accomplished level, and then making off with valuable books or cash loans.

In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, his goal was to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.”

On the Google conundrum:

It’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?

“Has anybody in Westchester County ever called the New York Times his or her ‘friend’? I realize that the rest of America, in its post-Katrina fatigue, is pretty tired of hearing New Orleanians, the city’s acolytes and defenders, always carrying on about how it’s the most unique city in America, but, the fact is, it is. Get over it.

And so, too, is its newspaper.”

“Which is the largest country in the world, economically speaking? It’s America, the United States. Do you know why? Because way back—this is history, you can look it up on the Internet—the colonization was done by men who believed in the word of God. And they were tithers. That’s why you see on the dollar bill: ‘In God we trust.”

"I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks... among other abuses."

“I saw the son of a bitch while I was up on my tractor, running the rotary cutter along a wall of green sagegrass that was five feet high. It was August in Mississippi, hot, on over in the afternoon but not near sundown. The sky had softened, and the coyote was trotting along in the open like the most unconcerned thing you could imagine.”

John Ackerman has spent millions procuring a majority of the known caves in Minnesota, which add up to dozens of miles of underground passageways and likely make him the largest cave owner in the U.S. He collects and charts them in the name of preservation, but his controversial methods have created many opponents.

In the wake of revolution, Libyans envision their future.

A profile of the “smart person’s” astrologer, and the people who believe in horopscopes.

The author on his 25 years in solitary confinement.

A participant in a deadly shooting spree decides to snitch on his friends.

A profile of Russell Baze, the winningest jockey in American history.

Investigating the burning of ancient books by rebels in Timbuktu.