In the 1880’s, a shabbily dressed man popped up in numerous America cities, calling upon local scientists, showing letters of introduction claiming he was a noted geologist or paleontologist, discussing both fields at a staggeringly accomplished level, and then making off with valuable books or cash loans.

A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track... Months later, Luger — who says he was “broke as a joke” by that point, about to become a father for the second time and seriously considering taking a job stocking boxes in a warehouse — heard that same beat on the radio, transformed into a Waka song called “Hard in da Paint.” Before long, he couldn’t get away from it.

Booze, sex, and the dark art of dealmaking in China.

Why America, and every other street in Massachusetts, runs (or will eventually run) on Dunkin’.

A profile of computational biologist Eric Schadt, the guy who’s figuring out what comes next after the Human Genome Project.

On the lifestyle of a fugitive retiree, and how it came to an end.

How two Italian teenagers hacked the Soviet space program and may have heard the dying breaths of a lost cosmonaut.

“I have drunkenly sexually assaulted or raped women—the exact number of which I am currently determining.”

On being gay in the military, three years before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

A vast majority of those interviewed had been interrogated at least once, and what they described was nearly the same. They said those under suspicion of homosexuality suffer bright lights in their eyes and sometimes handcuffs on their wrists, warnings that their parents will be informed or their hometown newspapers called, threats that their stripes will be torn off and they will pushed through the gates of the base before a jeering crowd.

“If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you’re right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you’re also right.”

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

The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old family-run auto parts manufacturer, and the transformation of the U.S. manufacturing industry.

The revolutionary and the silver screen.

INTERVIEWER: I imagine that people try to set you up as some sort of guru, whether political or metaphysical.

LESSING: I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying.

In the ’50s and ’60s, the Reverend Will Campbell marched with MLK Jr. and worked to desegregate the University of Mississippi. Later, broke, he took a job as Waylon Jennings’ roadie and occasional spiritual guru. Afterward, his ministry grew even stranger and more itinerant.

An interview with the founding editor of the New York Review of Books, who died Monday.

He was the most powerful fish broker in New Bedford, America’s most valuable seafood port. The Russians who arrived looking to buy his operation were undercover agents and he told them everything.

Nearly three decades ago, Mother Jones profiled a rising star in the Republican Party:

The divorce turned much of Carrollton against Gingrich. Jackie was well loved by the townspeople, who knew how hard she had worked to get him elected-as she had worked before to put him through college and raise his children. To make matters worse, Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor While she was still in the hospital, according to Howell, "Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.

On a childhood fascination with the mid-18th century battle.

A dispatch from Eloise Woods, a natural burial ground where bodies are consigned directly to the earth.

The battle between 1975’s biggest shows.

The coordinated government attack on queer Russia.