Behind the scenes of Conan vs. Leno. An excerpt from The War for Late Night.

Are we at war? The U.S. government’s evolving response to cyber security and its impact on privacy.

Tony Kushner and the burdens of being one of the last public intellectuals in American theater.

After nearly a year in Afghanistan—during which almost half of their unit was killed or injured—paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne have one more mission before they go home.

The narcocorrido-immortalized Pacific coast traditionalists, the kidnap-crazed Gulf coast Zetas, and massacres that no longer seem tied to a discernible purpose; inside the ruins of the Mexican-American border.

A rare co-mingling between Hasidic Jews and their Crown Heights neighbors within Brooklyn’s ‘Basil Pizza & Wine Bar.’

What we can learn from procrastination.

Why did a veteran BBC on-air personality confess on camera to a mercy killing he did not commit?

If the fittest survive, why are so many people still depressed? An evolutionary theory on the benefits of painful rumination.

The world’s most renowned chef, Ferran Adrià, says that the only way he can push forward the art form of cooking is to close his own restaurant.

This isn’t truck-on-truck violence. It’s the taxpaying owners of brick-and-mortar restaurants—along with a host of other powerful District players—who are waging the attack.

In Torreón, north of Mexico City, cartel gunmen are freed from a prison, commit a massacre at a wedding that includes the band, and then return to custody.

In 1992, Anthony Graves was arrested for brutally murdering a family in the middle of night. He had no motive. There was no physical evidence. The only witness recanted. And yet Graves remains behind bars.

How misdirected incentives in the bewildering medical supply industry keep innovative, life-saving equipment from reaching hospitals.

It makes as much money as Whole Foods while stocking 90 percent fewer products. The Trader Joe’s business model explained.

A Holocaust detective story: could a lampshade pulled from the ruins of Katrina really be Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?

Across the country, little-known schools are accepting almost everyone who applies, cashing a lot of checks, and offering so little support that only the most determined students leave with a degree.

A profile of Kanye West written in the style of an all-access magazine piece - using only quotes and statements that Kanye West has made on Twitter and other web outlets.

A day in the political life of Barack Obama.

Two sisters, heirs to the Bronfman fortune, may have blown $100 million supporting the cult-like group NXIVM.

How Juarez became the murder capital of the world.

An interview with Greil Marcus on the songs of Van Morrison and why people are afraid of imagined things.

How sex scandals have made Silvio Berlusconi even more powerful in Italy.

Tony Judt on his own amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the experience of being “left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.”

An interview with Lawrence Schiller, himself one of the great interviewers of his time, whose research fueled Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.