When a gossip rag went after the CEO, he retaliated with the brutal, brilliant efficiency he used to build his business empire.

COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

On office chairs.

In the 1950s and '60s, the distinctions between rank found blunt expression in chair design, naming and price point; Knoll, for example, produced "Executive," "Advanced Management," and "Basic Operational" chairs in the late 1970s. Recall the archetypal scenes where the boss, back to the door, protected by an exaggerated, double-spine headrest, slowly swivels around to meet the eyes of his waiting subordinate, impotent in a stationary four-legger.

Is a well-received work of William Faulkner scholarship a hoax?

Is the anonymous, reclusive inventor of Bitcoin this 64-year-old man in Los Angeles?

Sissel Tolaas is a star in the world of smells. Her methods are not always subtle.

Groupon disasters, the behaviors of the consumer swarm, and how the “1% and the 90% [are] collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle.”

After a member of the Church of Wells abruptly left the group (which may or may not be a cult), many held out hope. A week later she went back, and the church’s elders are eager to explain why.

Previously: Sinners in the Hands

On the dilemmas facing a (very famous) working mother in New York City. “It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam—which, let me make it very clear, I have not done—than it is to speak honestly about this topic.”

"Some in Nice knew the man as one of the many playboy predators the city seems to beget—black hair slicked back off a shining brow, dress shoes tapering to varnished points, a dark shirt unbuttoned low to reveal the pectorals into which he had obsessively, unblushingly, invested himself. He was 31 but preferred older women, both for their erotic openness and, it seems clear, for their money. Those who knew him best knew him to be a cold and brutal man, detached, amused by little save rough sex and gore."

Computer scientist tycoon Robert Mercer is at the heart of a shockingly well-funded propaganda network.

Conspiracy theorists think that the government killed the aspiring Libertarian filmmaker David Crowley to stop him from making his film about an authoritarian takeover of the United States and the vets who fight back. The truth is far stranger.

The dramatic liberties a much-heralded film takes with historical fact show how hard it is to get complexity onto the big screen.

A profile of the world’s best League of Legends player, a 19-year-old Korean kid whose nickname is God.

Turning down the huge amounts of money a fracking contract can offer is always the beginning of a fight.

“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

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.

For 10 years, Libre—an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity—has been working to foster conservatism in Hispanic communities. Now, the group is going all-in on Georgia’s Senate runoffs.

She entered the national spotlight after she live streamed the death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, who was shot by police during a traffic stop. This is Diamond Reynolds’s life today.

“The case of Lisl Auman, who first wrote me from prison three years ago, is so rotten and wrong and shameful that I feel dirty just for knowing about it, and so should you.”

“Has anybody in Westchester County ever called the New York Times his or her ‘friend’? I realize that the rest of America, in its post-Katrina fatigue, is pretty tired of hearing New Orleanians, the city’s acolytes and defenders, always carrying on about how it’s the most unique city in America, but, the fact is, it is. Get over it.

And so, too, is its newspaper.”

“Why do people laugh when tickled? Why can’t you tickle yourself? Why are certain parts of the body more ticklish than others? Why do some people enjoy tickling and others not? And what is tickling, after all?”

Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.