The polar icecaps are melting. Is it OK to have a child? Australia is on fire. Is it OK to have a child? My house is flooded, my crops have failed, my community is fleeing. Is it OK to have a child? It is, in a sense, an impossible question.

In the days after 9/11, Mark Stroman went on a revenge killing spree in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan survived and, a decade later, tried to stop Stroman’s execution.

While serving in WWII, Jerome Motto received regular correspondence from a woman he barely knew. These letters led to groundbreaking research on how to reach people at risk.

An advertising copywriter adjusts to daily life in Paris, and works in a dysfunctional office.

Office culture in Paris held that it was each person's responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people's desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties' personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk. Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her.  No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

Suzan Russaw is 70 years old. She lived in affordable Palo Alto housing for decades. Then, in 2013, she was forced to move into her car. On the new homeless of Silicon Valley.

The story of Ota Benga, captured in the Congo, displayed at the World’s Fair, and brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

When Clark Rockefeller snatched his daughter during a custody dispute, what the D.A. called “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career” came unraveled, and the trail led to bones buried in a California backyard.

On driving (and walking) in the Middle East – from Syria to Lebanon, across Saudi Arabia to Dammam, in a taxi through war-torn Beirut.

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

Bill Ferguson does not believe his son, Ryan, killed a popular newspaper editor. To prove it, he’s drained his savings, performed public re-enactments of the crime, and alienated almost everyone in his Missouri city.

How a U.S. law intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuels has unleashed an environmental disaster in Indonesia.

Police unions were born of resistance to discipline for brutality. Do they belong in the labor movement?

Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.

On the rise of telemedicine in rural America, where the number of ER patients has surged by 60 percent in the past decade as the number of doctors and hospitals has declined by up to 15 percent.

In defense of fiction.

Why hundreds of Buddhist monks moved from Taiwan to Prince Edward Island, buying up thousands of acres of land in the process.

Adventures in acedia, from Aquinas to Bartleby.

“By the time we got to Woodstock 99 …” In a grim finale, the nineties get their Altamont.

Stephen Reed was “mayor for life” in Harrisburg, PA. Now he’s going to trial on 114 counts of bribery, theft, and fraud.

On the people who lie about serving in the military and the detectives who try to expose them.

In the not-so-distant future, all of our objects will talk to each other. They’ll make our coffee, find our keys, save our lives. The roadmap to a fully networked existence.

On January 1st, 2011, the U.S. estate tax will jump from zero to around 50%, which gives a lot of very rich elders (or perhaps more accurately, their heirs) millions of dollars in incentive to expedite death.