A trip to visit a friend in prison.

In defense of snark.

How a comedy writer making $300,000 a year ended up homeless.

An odyssey through America’s mental health system.

The thin, resentful line between comic and audience.

The emotional toll on drone pilots.

A clandestine meeting between Western journalists and Hezbollah fighters in a Beirut strip mall.

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

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

After the storms, a man tries to find his lost cat.

A doctor and a rabbi try to find ways to understand the world, and God, and one another.

A woman’s communications and interactions with a potential criminal.

A dirty story about delicate hands.

A story about love letters and failed connections.

How the biggest club in Vegas does business.

A profile of Scooter Braun, the man who made Justin Bieber.

A cautionary tale.

How the museum-quality 55,000 film collection that an East Village video store gave away ended up in a small, possibly mob-run village in Sicily.

A writer and his pills.

A profile of Jordan at 50.

The girlfriend who wasn’t and everyone who bought it.

Bobby Riggs, the mob and “The Battle of the Sexes.”

The life and sudden death of NASCAR’s Dick Trickle.

How sports channels extort cable subscribers.

A series of mysterious, dangerous interactions in a bathhouse.

A series of linked fantasies, veering from the whimsical to the grave.

The appearance of a “mole man” reflects the past and realities of a hardscrabble town.

A party game drives a woman to reflect upon a history of manipulation.

Greek heroes and gods roam suburban America.

From 1976 to 1986, one of the most violent serial criminals in American history terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and might still be out there. The author, along with several others, can’t stop working on the case.

William Sparkman Jr., a census worker, was found hanging from a tree in rural Kentucky. He was naked, hands bound, with the letters “FED” written across his chest. Inside the investigation into how—and why—he died.

After a botched bank robbery in 1990, Sture Bergwall, aka Thomas Quick, confessed to a string of brutal crimes. He admitted to stabbings, stranglings, incest and cannibalism. He was convicted of eight murders in all, and after the final trial he went silent for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, Bergwall came forward again—there was one more secret he had to tell.

How a killer and his teenage accomplice used listings for “the job of a lifetime” to lure their victims, all down-and-out single men, to the backwoods of Ohio.

The haunted past of Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama neurobiologist who shot six colleagues during a staff meeting.