A first-hand account of San Francisco in the hours and days after the devastating 1906 earthquake.

Gang-bang buffet tables, deeply earnest 'Letters to the Editor,' ghost-writing Kierkegaard references into model bios in Barely Legal, and how a half-decade of reviewing porn eroded the thin line between the author's alter egos and self.

Watching the jazz singer in New York.

The first piece of gonzo journalism, annotated.

On chemo.

Yearning for conception.

Meeting Christopher Thomas Knight, a.k.a. the North Pond Hermit, who lived alone in the Maine woods for nearly 30 years.

“As my acting career developed, I was no longer cast as a radical Muslim – except at the airport.”

It’s legal to buy poppy seeds in America and it’s legal to plant them—unless you’re familiar with the simple process of turning them into opium, that is. Then having poppies in your garden is a felony.

A stripping trip to Florida gone horribly astray told across 158 tweets.

The challenge of finding answers about some abandoned cremains.

At age 22, the author went undercover at his old high school. An excerpt of the book that became the film.

Less than a week after Katrina, Michael Lewis goes home to New Orleans.

Memories of living with the writer Andrew Lytle late in his life.

Two summers spent teaching and living in the hills of Tennessee.

A trip to the Famous Poets Society convention/contest in Reno.

A dispatch from Eloise Woods, a natural burial ground where bodies are consigned directly to the earth.

A cornucopia of endearments and insults.

On the perils and rewards of feminism.

Spending the summer as a tour guide on a glacier.

A daughter remembers her father’s glass eye.

One man describes his family’s tradition of delivering rhyming couplets at celebrations.

Growing up among the tall waves and schoolyard bullies of Hawaii.

On touring America and the culture of trailer parks in the early 1950s.

A mortuary employee surveys her scene.