INTERVIEWER: You once said the novel is dead. VIDAL: That was a joke.

The magician who spent his life debunking spiritualists and exposing con men.

A trip to Nashville to interview the writer Ann Patchett.

How Warren Hinckle and Ramparts magazine helped revive muckraking journalism and launch the New Left.

How Andrew Anglin went from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll.

Charlie Santore sees Los Angeles from the inside, by breaking into safes whose owners can no longer unlock them.

What one funny-looking fish taught us about evolution, the internet, and the monsters we create.

One year ago the journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never walked out. This is what happened.

Thomas Joshua Cooper risks his life to document the world’s remotest places.

An insider watches Kink.com prepare to leave the hundred-year-old armory it occupies in San Francisco.

On the fraught relationship between Bolivia’s Evo Morales and the indigenous activists who support him.

As vaccines roll out, the U.S. will face a choice about what to learn and what to forget.

How the writer Jesse Armstrong keeps the billionaire Roy family trapped in its gilded cage.

On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.

A visit to the French hideaway of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, who had avoided arrest on murder charges for nearly 20 years.

From our guide to fugitives for Slate.

Four Galician sisters take on the macho percebeira culture to harvest one of the world’s most expensive delicacies, the gooseneck barnacle, from the frigid sea.

Adapted from Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain’s Food Culture.

Scott Catt was a single dad trying to make ends meet, so he started robbing banks. Then he needed accomplices, so he asked his kids.

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.

Behind the scenes, a small team of FBI agents spent years trying to solve a stubborn mystery — whether officials from Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s closest allies, were involved in the worst terror attack in U.S. history. This is their story.

A little after 9 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1990, the owner of a steel-products company pulled up to her office in Vinegar Hill, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spotted a black garbage bag sitting on the sidewalk out front. She parked her car and went to move the bag when she noticed it leaking blood. The woman called 911. Within the hour, Ken Whelan, a homicide detective from the 84th Precinct, peered into the bag. It was full of human body parts.

Tom Catena is the only surgeon for thousands of square miles in Southern Sudan. His hospital, and his life, are constantly under threat. There is no end to the carnage he must treat. He refuses to leave.

Every year, more than $6 billion is raised by breast cancer charities. A look at how much of that money ends up in the hands of scammers.

An oddball team of ship salvagers is tasked with uprighting a tipped two-football-field-long cargo ship before it sinks into the darkness of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

“In some ways fame is gratifying, but you have to be very careful of what you wish for because you just might get it.”