On the stories we tell ourselves about happiness and the indecent questions we ask women who decided not to become moms.

A legend hangs on.

A private investigator asks a magazine to write a puff piece on his business. The journalist finds a real story.

When the greatest players in the world go head-to-head, things can get downright angsty.

Two Houston performance artists faux-marry an oak. Controversy ensues about the live installation’s relationship to the gay marriage debate.

What the heck happened?

Instead, they got scorched.

How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

A Texas con artist made millions promising prisoners’ families the thing they wanted most: to bring their children home.

How killing by remote control has changed the way we fight.

Before The Jerky Boys and Longmont Potion Castle there was Mal Sharpe.

Cesar Sayoc turned his loyalty toward Donald Trump into a literal assault on the President’s Democratic enemies in 2018.

The first major interview with The Simpsons’ most prolific and legendary writer.

The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.

As the snow tires rumbled on the highway beneath us, a neo-Nazi "troll army" was several days into attacking the Jewish people of Whitefish on Spencer's behalf, based on a belief that some Whitefish Jews had recently tried to run Spencer and his mother out of town. Details about what actually happened between the town and the Spencers were in short supply, and, among the neo-Nazi troll brigades, anti-Semitism was in abundance.

He’s their hero, but he’s also their soulmate, the one person in the world who understands them. That’s why Stephen Wesley and the legions of fans like him can’t get enough of the Mountain Goats. And that burden is crushing Darnielle.

On the passionate relationship between fans and John Danielle of the Mountain Goats.

Detroit is trying to end the longstanding practice of “scrapping,” which is the only way some of its residents can earn a living.

“The dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal—the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.”

A history of the divide between computing and language, and why we “define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand.’”

An oral history of Industrial Lights & Magic, which gave birth to Star Wars and countless films, as well as playing a hand in the creation of Photoshop and Pixar.

Putin v. Khodorkovsky:

Almost a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the owner of the Yukos Oil Company and Russia’s richest man, completely miscalculated the consequences of standing up to Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president. Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested, completely miscalculating the consequences of putting him in prison. During his eight years in confinement, Khodorkovsky has become Russia’s most trusted public figure and Putin’s biggest political liability. As long as Putin rules Russia and Khodorkovsky continues to act like Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky will remain in prison—and Putin will remain terrified of him.

An addict navigates 1980s Detroit.

A visit to the hotel North Korea starved to build, still unfinished after breaking ground in 1987.

A visit to a Maine museum devoted to Bigfoot and other mythical creatures.

On the investors betting big on the Iraqi economy, which they believe has nowhere to go but up.