The rise of One Direction fanfiction that imagines the band members in relationships – with each other.

An essay on Jimmy Savile, British television and child sexual abuse.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, profiled.

Michael Quinn took on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and lost.

Efraim Zuroff does not want to retire.

Adventures in bartending.

Becoming a priest in Boston amidst a sex abuse scandal and church closings.

On the moral behavior of animals.

How modernity – and an eruption of violence – changed “the most remote inhabited island on the Atlantic seaboard.”

A non-erotic journey.

Barry Zito, profiled.

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

Profiles of people with genius-level IQs.

“From all appearances, this place is still an earthly paradise. There is just one problem, though you could stare at this palm grove for a lifetime and never see it. The soil under our feet, whitish gray in color with flecks of coral, contains a radioactive isotope called cesium 137.”

Life inside Long Island’s largest cluster of sex offenders.

The former chancellor of New York City schools was not, in fact, “a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.”

An impossible hike in Western China.

On Queens’ stubbornly unchanging Roosevelt Avenue, where immigrants pay $2 a song to grind against hired dancers and shuttered houses of prostitution have given way to rolling brothel-vans.

I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it.

The last men who ride the rails, “where silence and lawlessness still reign.”

A Javanese shrine where Muslim pilgrims seeking good fortune must peform a ritual: find a stranger, have sex with them.

Unraveling the layers of upstate New York’s most reclusive community.

On a biography of David Foster Wallace.

On the staff of a Trader Joe’s in New York City.

How Tony Galeota went from mobbed-up teen on Long Island to legendary strip club manager in Miami to distraught prisoner in a Panamanian jail.