Peter Zumthor, who recently won the Pritzker Prize after a career of few buildings and mostly modest-in-size projects, on the “architecture of actually making things”

A profile of Martha Nussbaum, whose ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion.

A profile of a previously unknown rookie pitcher for the Mets who dropped out of Harvard, made a spiritual quest to Tibet, and somewhere along the line figured out how to throw a baseball much, much faster than anyone else on Earth.

In 16 months, he has broken into more than a thousand homes up and down the San Fernando Valley. According to the police, his haul is worth anywhere from $16 million to $40 million. And yet because he has cultivated so many aliases, law-enforcement officials have been hard-pressed to learn his real name—Ignacio Peña Del Río—much less comprehend his unlikely background.

The author tracked down “the other” Alan – Alan Z. Feuer – for a story last year. After the other Alan’s death, however, the author learns the truth about the society man’s humble past.

“The squirrels may take my tomatoes and spit them back, but they would not go unanswered. The time had come to close the circle of life.”

She lives in a world called Calalini with an invisible companion named 400-the-Cat; inside the life of a six-year-old with schizophrenia.

The 20 soldiers in Second Platoon try in vain to hold down a strategic outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, “among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces.”

A profile of Rick Santorum published early in his final campaign for the U.S. Senate, a race widely considered a stepping stone to the White House before he lost.

How David Milch, the creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, blew his $100 million fortune at the track.

In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country. The patients, doctors say, seem to have lost the will to live.

Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the coast of Italy, has become a cult classic (and a warning).

For more than 50 years, world governments have trusted a single Swiss code-making machine company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers, and diplomats secret. It turns out that company was run by the CIA.

The bodies in the chalet were found in a secret chamber, arranged radiating out from a point like spokes in a wheel. Some had suffocated, some had been shot. They all were followers of a mysterious prophet, Luc Jouret.

How the case of a poisoned college student in China, cold for 18 years, has suddenly turned into “what may be the largest amateur online manhunt in history.”

A profile of Judy Clarke, who takes on the most heinous, notorious defendants in America, trying to save them from the death penalty. Until Dzokhar Tsarnaev, she usually succeeded.

When rival gangs confronted each other in the parking lot of a Hooters-esque restaurant, bullets flew. But was the whole a police setup?

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.

A Wikipedia-style dissection of the case that inspired The Fugitive. The accused, Dr. Sam Sheppard, claimed to have struggled with an intruder before being knocked out and dumped on a beach, his wife’s left corpse in their house.

How did an obscure artist who survived the Cultural Revolution become a viral sensation and suddenly the surreal, sexy center of Fashion Week?

What the political history of radio can teach us about this moment on the internet.

How a big crime in a small town produced a whodunit as gripping and colorful as “The Wizard of Oz” itself.

How one company is rethinking the business of sex toys.