When a random person becomes a massive meme.

How we talk about—and live with—schizophrenia.

How solitary confinement can lead to suicide.

On corresponding with the Oklahoma City bomber.

Travels through post-election America.

How populism took a continent.

On the vexed territory between aquí and allá.

Inside the New York Public Library’s archives.

How the Christian film industry works.

Who really built the first electric rock ‘n’ roll guitar?

What’s actually happening at the box office.

Welcome to Toke-la-homa.

On the ground in Nigeria with the nation’s notorious scam artists, who share a remarkable number of qualities with America’s top entrepreneurs.

What happens when a decades old video, featuring the artist Larry Rivers’ prepubescent daughters bare-chested, is claimed both as child pornography and as an important part of the archive of a major American painter.

In 2003, the destruction of one particular statue in Baghdad made worldwide headlines and came to be a symbol of western victory in Iraq. But there was so much more to it—or rather, so much less.

Tyler Haire was locked up at 16. A Mississippi judge ordered that he undergo a mental exam. He would wait 1,266 days in an adult jail.

Mo Pinel spent a career reshaping the ball’s inner core to harness the power of physics. He revolutionized the sport—and spared no critics along the way.

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

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.

Gabriel Zucman is an economist who specializes in documenting and estimating the wealth stashed in offshore accounts. His work has influenced the tax plans of more than one presidential campaign.

“Fear is running rampant in the Curia, where the mood has rarely been this miserable. It’s as if someone had poked a stick into a beehive. Men wearing purple robes are rushing around, hectically monitoring correspondence. No one trusts anyone anymore, and some even hesitate to communicate by phone.”

On the floating villages of the Mekong River and the ethnic Vietnamese who have populated them for generations and are still considered “foreigners” by their Cambodian neighbors.

“It’s more than soup.”

Last year, a group of young Romanians stole millions of euros worth of art from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. They had previously only robbed homes and thought the artwork would be easy to sell. It was not. So they secreted it back home, where, in an effort to save her son, the leader’s mother burned it.

Kidnapping and international adoption.