An essay on PTSD.

Following the money and the opium in Afghanistan.

How Craig Venter’s bugs might save the world.

Guatemala discovers, in bat-guano spotted documents, the truth about its violent past.

We are disgusted by butchery, even as we eat more meat than ever.

The most dreadful men to live with are those who thus alternate between angel and devil.

Not long before she died, Anne Isabella Noel Byron gave a wide-ranging interview to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most notoriously, she accused her husband, Lord Byron, of carrying on a “secret adulterous intrigue” with his half-sister.

The Atlantic lost 15,000 subscribers in the months following publication of this article.

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

Inside the attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

A sociobiologist on how we evolved into artists.

How one man made millions with a fancy hamburger.

Portraits from weed country.

The case against Richard Florida.

On a movement divided.

How six different people live off six different, and wildly varying, incomes.

What one woman spends in a year.

What’s really happening in Kyrgyzstan.

How sex scandals have made Silvio Berlusconi even more powerful in Italy.

Nicky Louie and the Ghost Shadows.

On the religious revival underway in China.

Syrian orphans become child laborers in Turkey.

The internet has made porn ubiquitous. It’s also ruined the industry.

A conversation about beauty with an 86-year-old mathematician.

“They have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left – from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism – as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties – the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates.”

The Vice President’s days in Indiana.

The black messianic leader, known as Father Divine, that Jim Jones admired.