How Craig Venter’s bugs might save the world.

What happens when top universities focus on careers rather than minds.

A sociobiologist on how we evolved into artists.

On a movement divided.

Nicky Louie and the Ghost Shadows.

The Vice President’s days in Indiana.

A physicist remembers working on the Manhattan Project.

She stumbled into communist circles, and it nearly derailed her career.

The Maryland man who houses antique feminine hygiene products.

On the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, women express themselves through fierce short poems.

How pop-up tax preparers make billions off the poor.

On Dooce.com founder Heather Armstrong.

How one company helps landlords exploit a loophole in New York’s tenant laws.

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.

On the tortured psyche of former 49ers coach Bill Walsh and how it led to Finding the Winning Edge, his 550-page guide to the game that has become the football’s bible.

The story of the “Barefoot Bandit,” a teenage fugitive on the run.

In 1956, an ocean liner named the Andrea Doria sank off the coast of Cape Cod. Half a century later, deep-sea divers—the author included—were still risking their lives to explore it.

“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.”