Jeff Walton is a 69-year-old plumber with a wife and 35-year-old son. It turns out he’s also Ronald Stan, a Canadian man who faked his own death in 1977.

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

Did A.Q. Khan sell nuclear secrets on the black market? The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West—an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role.

Do not assume, just because there is champagne and whiskey and maybe, sometimes, drugs, that these shuckers aren’t also thinking long and hard, and often poetically, about their métier.

A look inside Google’s Ground Truth.

On the 1,600-year-old text that suggests that Jesus, long believed to be celibate, was a married man.

How a Tulsa preacher used direct mail to create the American religious right.

An interview on craft.

On “Operation Bambi,” the secret plan to oust “Today” show co-host Ann Curry.

Inside carpenter brothers Ryan and Dylan, and their stripper sister Lee-Grace Dougherty’s eight-day, fifteen-state, AK-47-wielding crime spree.

On L.A.’s Homeboy Industries, which offers former felons—including at least one disgraced CEO—the chance to work.

Margaret Profet, evolutionary biologist and MacArthur grant recipient, disappeared in 2005. She has neither been seen nor heard from since.

What would drive a man to stand outside the Vatican embassy nearly every day for 14 years?

Afghans have long visited falbin to have their futures foretold. Fundamentalist Muslim clerics hope to stop that.

Michael Phelps returns to his Olympic training after a 45-day stint at The Meadows.

How a celebrated American artist was forced to trade his multimillion-dollar collection for a job selling donuts.

It makes as much money as Whole Foods while stocking 90 percent fewer products. The Trader Joe’s business model explained.

Four years after a disastrous MTV performance had led him to avoid the public, Rose was back on stage.

Few Americans are as affected by climate change as Alaska’s Inupiat, or as dependent on the fossil-fuel economy.

When his father was murdered, Wasil Ahmad vowed revenge. He was 8 years old.

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska, veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call.

During the 90s, David Bazan was Christian indie-rock’s first big crossover star. Then he stopped believing.

Even soldiers who fight wars from a safe distance have found themselves traumatized.

Inside Iraq’s most notorious prison, an Army interrogator named Joshua Casteel came fact to face with a truth about the war—and himself.

It was just a kayaking trip. Then it upended their lives.