The author visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 13 years after his sister’s death.

How a state that was never in doubt became a “national embarrassment.”

They were exhausting, impossible, stingy, and cruel, just like at their day jobs.

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

While political leaders trade threats, the pandemic has made Americans even more reliant on China’s manufacturers.

He covered car accidents for a years as a journalist. Then he was in two himself.

Novelist Brad Thor thought he had found his doomsday-prepping soulmate, but then the End Times went bad.

In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town, capturing the world’s attention.

The primate who ruled the news vanished again. A quest to find him led deep into Florida’s monkey kingdom.

“I come to America, I go to England, I go to France…nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure. … It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk—in their personal life.”

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.

On the echoes between the world leading up to World War I and our present international trajectory. Then, as globalization, nationalism, and radicalism converged, and tensions within the Balkans served as a spark. Today, conflicts in the Middle East, whose borders were mostly drawn in the wake of World War I, could play a similar role.

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.

As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.

In the past the only people who wrote autobiographies or memoirs were very important, those who had a crucial role in the history of their own country—Napoleon, Goethe—or were witness to major events or people who had singular, adventurous lives. Otherwise, it is ridiculous to write your autobiography.

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.

A son, the illusion of his dead father and where technology intersects with real life.

A woman bonds with her terminally ill sister over food, memories, and shaky lives.

Modern methods allow the Islamic State to keep up its systematic rape of captives under medieval codes.

Calvin Stanley is a fourth-grader at Cross Country Elementary School. He rides a bike, watches TV, plays video games and does just about everything other 10-year-old boys do. Except see.

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.

A profile of Norman Lear, the producer behind All in the Family and The Jeffersons, who is still making TV at age 94.

Her grandfather, she found out decades after he died, was not her grandfather. Who did that make her?

“I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.”