On a neuroscientist’s personal mission to solve the mystery of how the brain processes time.

A profile of the famed photographer.

A profile of Carmelo Anthony, newly anointed savior of the New York Knicks.

You’re not supposed to just vanish at Vortex Spring. Dive too deep and you might not make it back to the surface, but a search party will eventually find your body. Nobody has found Ben McDaniel yet.

A student fires three shots during a sixth period social studies class. “Then nothing happened, and that’s a problem.”

From the Tower of Babel to the birthplace of Abraham, from Saddam’s ruined palaces to fortified blast-proof checkpoints, a diary from a nine-day, eight-night tour of Mespotamia/Iraq.

Inside the world of air-traffic controllers.

When they met, he was 45 and she was 17. In her 14 years as his mistress, she appeared in countless paintings, including Guernica.

In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, his goal was to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.”

It’s like when they fucking show—I know nothing about plays and shit, but sometimes they’ll show a play on TV, and it’s fucking shit, because you’re like, “What the fuck, am I supposed to think that’s a moon?” Like it’s a cardboard moon or some shit.

The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.

The Civil War started 150 years ago today. A primer on how and why.

When Chicago’s Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, it was the biggest hotel in the world. By the time it was closed, it had bankrupted and caused the suicide of a member of the Stevens’ family (which included a seven-year-old future Justice John Paul Stevens), and changed the city forever.

She is an unknown struggling writer. Her boyfriend is Jonathan Franzen.

Driving cross-country in a chemical tanker.

On Ray Dalio, who built the world’s biggest hedge fund by running it like a cult.

On billionaire financier Lynn Tilton and her quest to become a public figure.

The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

How France’s public schools became the battleground in a culture war.

A profile of the “lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-talk-show-host-turned-journalist.”

Like hundreds of other local slaves — [they] had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

On David Milch; Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush, literature professor, longtime junkie, creator of NYPD Blue, Deadwood (which was in production when this profile was written), and the forthcoming racetrack-set HBO series Luck.