On tourism and authenticity.

Long before the likes of Kim Kardashian, Marie Bashkirtseff sought to secure celebrity through curation of “personal brand.”

Fred Franzia makes a lot of money selling really cheap wine.

On the confines of masculinity.

The case for gay marriage.

Former Washington Post opinion page editor Greenfield on not being overwhelmed by the past in the search for a “better truth”:

History helps guard against moral smugness too, or it should, anyway. For you are obliged, if you are honest, to acknowledge at least some reflection or resonance of the fallen ones in your own nature. Such humility is a conspicuously missing aspect of our contemporary culture, however. What might be a becoming spell of moral introspection, tends instead to become an orgy of bashing and blaming. I observe that now, as always in this country, when people speak of a terrible, all embracing decline in ethical standards, they are invariably speaking of the decline in their next door neighbor's standards, not their own.

An oral history of Garry Shandling’s secret pickup basketball game.

The quest to create a cheap, durable, clean stove for the masses.

“My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother.”

Could tinkering with photosynthesis prevent a global food crisis?

A profile of Amar Bose, founder of the Bose Corporation.

A federal judge resents the harshness of mandatory drug sentences.

Live from Kingston for Frazier vs. Foreman.

The flawed data on safety equipment.

“My mother became my daughter when I was nine years old.”

A profile of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Workweek.

Assessing 40 years of treatment.

My abiding faith in the possibility of self-transformation propelled me from one therapist to the next, ever on the lookout for something that seemed tormentingly out of reach, some scenario that would allow me to live more comfortably in my own skin. For all my doubts about specific tenets and individual psychoanalysts, I believed in the surpassing value of insight and the curative potential of treatment — and that may have been the problem to begin with.

How one company is rethinking the business of sex toys.

Craig Cunningham has a simple solution for getting bill collectors off his back. He sues them.

Thousands of patients report lingering symptoms. Can research into another mysterious syndrome help?

A former NBA player describes his own unraveling.

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.

Petra Kvitova’s long road back.