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.

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

His health failing and his business in tatters, the head of Death Row Records faces murder charges that could put him away for life.

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.

He was America’s first celebrity chef, setting the hedonistic tone of California cuisine in the ’70s and ’80s. Then Jeremiah Tower lost his restaurant and ended up in Mexico, exiled from the booming culinary culture he helped create. Now, at 71, he’s coming home to take over the kitchen at Tavern on the Green.

It had seemed simple in the beginning. Now everything was so complicated, he wasn’t sure what the truth was. He had to admit that he might have gotten involved with the wrong people—that he might have become part of a scam within a scam.

He was an itinerant preacher who claimed god have revealed him to be the one true prophet. He kidnapped Elizabeth Smart  and lived with her in a makeshift camp for years. She was hard to find; not because he was sly, but because Utah is full of prophets with multiple young wives.

From 1976 to 1986, one of the most violent serial criminals in American history terrorized communities throughout California. He was little known, never caught, and might still be out there. The author, along with several others, couldn’t stop working on the case.

A woman is accused of lying about being raped. Years later and several states away, the story changed.

How Brock Pierce ended up as an Epstein guest along with a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics is a bizarre tale involving Steve Bannon and an international man of mystery who may or may not be dead.

Unpacking the empty promises of the minimalism craze.

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, one ill-fated cruise ship became a symbol for the panic and confusion that would soon engulf the globe. What two harrowing weeks trapped aboard the ocean liner felt like—for unsuspecting tourists, for frightened crew members, and for the captain himself.

The hunt for rare 1933 Double Eagle coins:

The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting the nation’s currency, has been pursuing them for nearly 70 years, through 13 Administrations and 12 different directors. The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.

Inside the safe houses where Syrian youth protesters have retreated since the uprising:

Around his neck he wore a tiny toy penguin that was actually a thumb drive, which he treated like a talisman, occasionally squeezing it to make sure it was still there. I sat next to him on the mattress and watched as he traded messages with other activists on Skype, then updated a Facebook page that serves as an underground newspaper, then marked a Google Earth map of Homs with the spots of the latest unrest. “If there’s no Internet,” Abdullah said, “there’s no life.”