On riding China’s Qinghai-Tibet Railway just before it opened:

Staring out at the shimmering tracks and concrete-reinforced embankment extending to the horizon, I can’t help but think of the senior Chinese scientist who confessed to me that the rail line he helped build might not be safe for long.

The Badger State is designed to keep Republicans in power, at the expense of the minority vote.

“The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response. The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.”

It’s been a rough year.

On a 16-year-old with a debilitating disorder: trichtillomania.

On Ryan Coogler’s film.

Paranoia and hypocrisy in America’s heartland.

Amidst the football-obsessed culture of small-town Christian colleges in Kansas, a player is killed at a party.

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.

On the structural underpinnings of the revolts currently shaking the Arab world.

The Department of Energy is in chaos and it is putting the world at risk.

The organization’s leadership is focused on external threats, but the real crisis is of its own making.

Here’s what’s become of them.

On Lucille Miller, who in San Bernadino in 1964 was convicted of burning her husband to death in his Volkswagen.

A mid-boom critique of New York City’s high-priced, mostly glass condo buildings.

How a group of 17 trans athletes came together last November to make history.

In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.

How phone phreakers, many of them blind, opened up Ma Bell to unlimited free international calling using a technical manual and a toy organ.

A profile of 23-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio (and his rowdy crew).

A midwife, a rash of stillbirths and miscarriages, and a town whose economy depends on fracking.

High school dropouts are descending on San Francisco with nothing more than a backpacks full of clothes and ideas.