Since she first started working in the hospitality industry two decades ago, Vida Afram has cleaned nearly 60,000 hotel rooms.

Why is life in this country so hostile to single people?

Dr. Drew has turned addiction television into a mini-empire, offering treatment and cameras to celebrities who have fallen far enough to take the bait.  His motivations, he insists, are pure:

Whether the doctor purposefully cultivates his celebrity stature for noble means or wittingly invites it because he himself likes being in the spotlight, he is operating on the assumption that his empathetic brand of TV will breed empathy instead of the more likely outcome, that it will just breed more TV.

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.

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

Almost five years ago, the author’s 13-year-old niece was murdered in her bedroom in suburban New Delhi. Since then, both of her parents have spent time in jail. Evidence, bungled by police, points to another possible killer. The trial has not yet begun.

He set a world record in the 100-yard dash as a teenager. He was mentored by Muhammad Ali and a man who orchestrated the largest bank embezzlement in U.S. history. He was homeless for part of his adult life before making a comeback at age 34. Throughout it all, Houston McTear was really, really fast.

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.

A visit to Albania to watch Henry Marsh perform his pioneering surgery where the patient is kept awake during the removal of a tumor and the “brain is stimulated with an electric probe, so that the surgeon can see if and how the patient reacts.”

According to the movie version, they died side by side, guns blazing, in the crosshairs of half a Bolivian regiment. It’s a great Hollywood ending that happens to be true, mostly: they left America… then died in Bolivia. What Hollywood didn’t know is that Butch and Sundance escaped.

“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own ­aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know ­whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”

An immigrant on what happens when neighbors turn on each other:

"Every Bosnian I know had a friend, or even a family member, who flipped and betrayed the life they had shared until, in the early 1990s, the war started. My best high-school friend turned into a rabid Serbian nationalist and left his longtime girlfriend in Sarajevo so he could take part in its siege. My favorite literature professor became one of the main ideologues of Serbian fascism. Just last week, I talked to a Muslim man from Foča whose mother was repeatedly raped by his Serb friend, and whose brother was killed by their neighbor. Yugoslavia and Bosnia had provided a sense of societal stability for a couple of generations, which is why the betrayal was so shocking to so many of us."

The dispute over what may be the biggest sunken treasure ever found – and who gets to keep it.

On frozen dumplings, industrial freezers, and what the future could hold after China’s burgeoning refrigeration boom.

The writer is reluctantly whisked away to to a small house in upstate New York to attend an ayhuasca ceremony with six strangers.

A small New Jersey town is world-famous among Orthodox Jews as a place to come ask for handouts.

Richard Gere, AIDS anxiety and the search for the “Original Gerbil.”

How Human Potential Movement workshops permeated our lives and our businesses.

Investigating a former NFL star’s new business: renting professional athletes to their biggest fans.

“He was, it must be said, a pig. And my heart grew fonder.”

A 12-hour interview on career and craft.

Ana Montes was a decorated U.S. intelligence analyst. She was also a Cuban spy.

Jurors from the Emmett Till trial revisit the case 50 years later.

How a Peace Corps volunteer turned a high school basketball squad into Afghanistan’s national team.