A year with a high school support group for boys who have lost a parent.

"I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z."

An essay on raising birds.

A portrait of the Somali capital.

On Ephemerisle, a “floating festival of radical self-reliance,” and other attempts at creating an island utopia.

Their religion prohibits lawsuits. The energy companies know it.

How to drive across America in less than 32 hours and 7 minutes.

On the dangerous glut of visitors looking to conquer Mt. Everest, where there is sometimes a two-hour wait to climb the Hillary Step.

An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”

A trip to a pepper-eating contest in remote India.

A week in the life of Naomi and Spencer Haskell.

Why the head of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey hired a former CIA agent to ruin a freelance writer’s career.

A profile of Dennis Rodman today.

The author, an abortion counselor, was 40 and pregnant when a conflicted Catholic woman came to her clinic.

Inside the White Student Union of Towson University.

A crash course in Tantra and superficial spirituality.

On the lives of street kids.

The era of personal space travel finally arrives.

An Aboriginal community’s attempt to maintain a 50,000-year-old way of life.

Rethinking mobile homes as senior housing.

The story of Kokie’s, and its gentrifying Williamsburg neighborhood.

A daughter’s attempt to solve the riddle of her mom.

A son’s memory of the father he lost at 13, excerpted from The Magical Stranger.

An investigation into shootings by U.S. Border Agents that have killed six Mexicans on Mexican soil over the past five years.