As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

In 2003, the destruction of one particular statue in Baghdad made worldwide headlines and came to be a symbol of western victory in Iraq. But there was so much more to it—or rather, so much less.

But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise. Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at "fixing" a nation that, to those who are attempting it, stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a disease that hadn't been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter million people.

In March of 1991, Vanilla Ice had the #1 album in the country (To the Extreme), a movie about to be released (TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze), and a dogged belief that his 15 minutes weren’t about to end.

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.

To read the transcript of Erin Hunter’s trial, which runs all of 81 pages and can be digested in half an hour, is to encounter a disregard for human dignity instrumental in producing the most sprawling system of incarceration in the world.

“Twenty-five years ago, I used to live in fear of Trevor Latham kicking my ass nearly every day. I grew up to be a writer. He grew up to run one of the toughest biker gangs in America. And then I tracked him down.”

In eight malls spread across three continents, kids get to try out grown-up jobs in corporate-sponsored theme parks. Welcome to KidZania—coming soon to the U.S.

The author came late to basketball. A profile of his favorite player:

He creates a sense of danger in the arena and yet has enough wit in his style to bring off funny ideas when he wants to.

In Harpersville, Alabama, a traffic violation can lead to months in jail and a never-ending stint in a work-release program – what some refer to as a modern-day debtors’ prison.

Brian Windhorst was one of the first reporters to cover LeBron James. He was there in high school. There at the draft. There in Cleveland. And now he’s there in Miami, though the relationship is far from what it used to be.

“In a landscape in which black people dominate the culture but have few recognized channels to respond to it, the show, which stars two American black men, provides a venue for black authority in the mainstream.”

In the Winter of 1964, the Fab Four rocket to superstardom in just six weeks.

The Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist, especially if you’re in talk radio.

The EPA called it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims.

On conspiracy theories in sports, from the ‘85 NBA draft lottery to Michael Phelps’ gold medal performance in the 100-meter butterfly.

John Ross, rebel reporter, became the sort of devoted gringo scribe who would give up drugs and drinking in order to better write about the native revolutionaries; the sort of man who used dolls to preach armed revolution to high schoolers in the weeks after September 11th.

“Some of the best lines — and I’ve been lucky to hear really nutso lines over the years — are not in response to any kind of question. It’s in response to, ‘I don’t know.’”

There’s no telling how many guns there are in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.

Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.

In an elaborate FBI sting to expose corruption, four agents pose as futures traders in Chicago. The plan works–if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars the agents lost in the process.

The gospel according to nine-year-olds; a missionary group that won the right to evangelize in schools and how children process their message.

Incremental changes in abortion laws lead to a system where women “turn themselves into pretzels” just to find a doctor.