In a few short hours, a normal evening along Texas’s Blanco River became the site of a deadly flash flood.

A youth set to the shifting sounds of CCM, Christian Contemporary Music:

This, by the way, is considered the ultimate sign of quality CCM, even amongst Christians: the ability to pass as secular. Every band’s goal was to have teenagers stop their grooving mid-song and exclaim, like a soda commercial actress who’s just realized she’s been drinking Diet, “Wait, this is Christian?”

A survey on where the industry is headed. Says one agency veteran: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”

His almost superhuman exploits made him one of the West’s most feared lawmen. Today, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal is widely believed to be the real Lone Ranger. But his true legacy is even greater.

A journey into the controversial religion:

In the next hour or so, Laurie asks me a number of questions: Am I married? Am I happy? What are my goals? Do I feel that I’m living up to my potential? A failure to live up to potential is one of the things known in Scientology as one’s "ruin." In trying to get at mine, Laurie is warm and nonaggressive. And, to my amazement, I begin to open up to her. While we chat, she delivers a soft sell for Scientology’s "introductory package": a four-hour seminar and twelve hours of Dianetics auditing, which is done without the E-meter. The cost: just fifty dollars. "You don’t have to do it," Laurie says. "It’s just something I get the feeling might help you." She pats my arm, squeezes it warmly.

“In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? “

A 21-year-old falls into a coma from which he’ll never emerge. His mother, desperate to grant his wish of becoming a father, has his sperm preserved. Two years later, after a fruitless search for other alternatives, she finds a willing doctor and tries one last option: carrying her son’s child herself.

Gang-bang buffet tables, deeply earnest 'Letters to the Editor,' ghost-writing Kierkegaard references into model bios in Barely Legal, and how a half-decade of reviewing porn eroded the thin line between the author's alter egos and self.

From 1968-1973, the three teenage Wiggin sisters, guided by a domineering father, played their strange music at New Hampshire ballrooms and recorded a single album. The Philosophy of the World LP goes for over $500 today, but the intervening decades have not been kind to the Wiggins.

After a botched bank robbery in 1990, Sture Bergwall, aka Thomas Quick, confessed to a string of brutal crimes. He admitted to stabbings, stranglings, incest and cannibalism. He was convicted of eight murders in all, and after the final trial he went silent for nearly a decade. But a few years ago, Bergwall came forward again—there was one more secret he had to tell.

How coach Jurgen Klinsmann, “soccer’s Alexis de Tocqueville,” is trying to give the US an identity.

A profile of the novelist, who is surprised to be alive.

Sam Simon made a fortune from The Simpsons. Now, diagnosed with terminal cancer, he is racing to spend it.

After a 19-year-old is convicted of murdering his girlfriend, her family fights to free him from prison.

“Today it’s a mosquito. Tomorrow God only knows what is going to happen.”

How a Madrid workshop is perfecting the art of copying imperiled art, from Egyptian tombs to Renaissance paintings.

On internships at Disney World, where “labor is meant to have an almost invisible quality.”

A culture war is raging between the people diversifying science fiction and the men who’d like to roll that back.

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

Justice isn’t so easy to come by when an American soldier stationed abroad is accused of murder.

A Kiwi entrepreneur is leading a revolution in recreational drugs: he’s trying to make them safe.

An 18-month investigation proves reveals how easy it is to get away with murder in Baltimore.

When jail healthcare is outsourced to for-profit medical providers, inmates pay the price.

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

He planned to write a memoir, The Life of a Migrant. Its central thesis: The American Dream is a lie.