In California's San Joaquin Valley, about halfway between Bakersfield and Fresno, on the outskirts of the fly-infested, windblown, stink-soaked, dry-mouth town of Corcoran, sits the squat, sprawling expanse of Corcoran State Prison, where Charlie Manson is serving out the rest of a life sentence for…

Swift’s sold-out performance at MetLife Stadium in July. Photo: Larry Busacca/TAS Taylor Swift worries a lot about security. It’s an understandable concern. This spring, a man was arrested in the wee hours of the morning near her estate in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Police reportedly spotted him…

Credit: Steve Pyke The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. "You're going to leave it that far from the curb?" he asks. He's standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to…

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence .” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they…

Maybe I'm in the wrong but I get annoyed whenever I'm walking in the park and I hear, at my back, a bicycle bell. The call of "On your left!" also gets on my nerves. My fight instinct kicks in, and I have to force myself not to punch the bicyclist soon to go by. A single jab would do it. This is…

Case No. 218 How’s this for the good life? You’re rich, and you made the dough yourself. You’re well into your 80s, and have spent hardly a day in the hospital. Your wife had a cancer scare, but she’s recovered and by your side, just as she’s been for more than 60 years. Asked to rate the marriage…

News & Culture Oops, You Just Hired the Wrong Hitman Say you want someone, you know, eliminated —a lover, a business partner, a mother-in-law. There are guys out there who will do that. For a price. Then there's another kind of guy. A guy who looks and acts just like a regular hit man. Prison tats,…

Getty Images Follow @TIMEIdeas Being a boy can be a serious liability in today’s classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won’t sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study , leads teachers to underestimate their…

News & Culture Confessions of a Drone Warrior He was an experiment, really. One of the first recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and machines merge. He flew multiple missions, but he never left his computer. He hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar. He stalked and…

One year ago, a heavily armed man dressed as a police officer appeared on the beach of a youth summer camp in Norway. The kids had no way of knowing he was targeting them for the ills of Europe. Then he started shooting. And shooting. Where were the real cops? By the end of the day, seventy-seven…

The collision between life and death at the Chicago Marathon was set in motion by a single scuffed shoe. In November of 2010, Will Caviness, 34, a firefighter from Greensboro, N.C., was cruising through his first marathon, slicing through the salty, warm air of the Outer Banks at a 6:50 per mile…

In January 1985, Pizza Hut aired a commercial in South Carolina that featured a condemned prisoner ordering delivery for his last meal. Two weeks earlier, the state had carried out its first execution in twenty-two years, electrocuting a man named Joseph Carl Shaw. Shaw’s last-meal request had been…

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice E. Marwick Privacy and Big Data: The Players, Regulators and Stakeholders by Terence Craig and…

News & Culture The Year of Living Carlos Dangerously Anthony Weiner's sexting addiction nuked his political career (twice!), endangered his marriage (twice!), and turned him into a walking penis joke (forever!). Marshall Sella tails Weiner through his doomed campaign for New York mayor, speaks…

When Therapy Fails How a group of adolescents ends up jailed, crazy, or dead This story was originally released on The Big Roundtable , a startup which exclusively publishes longform narrative nonfiction. Your donations are what pay Big Roundtable journalists and help them to report more stories you…

Illustration by Oliver Munday Between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012, people across the United States suddenly found themselves unable to get their hands on A.D.H.D. medication. Low-dose generics were particularly in short supply. There were several factors contributing to the shortage, but…

Last week, Sweden’s Oskarshamn nuclear power plant, which supplies 10% of the country’s energy, had to shut down one of its three reactors after a jellyfish invasion clogged the piping of its cooling system. The invader, a creature called a moon jellyfish, is 95% water and has no brain. Not what you…

Credit: anoldent via Flickr Every now and then during the workweek—usually around three in the afternoon—a familiar ache begins to saturate my forehead and pool in my temples. The glare of my computer screen appears to suddenly intensify. My eyes trace the contour of the same sentence two or three…

Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, as Wells Tower discovered when he traveled to Tupelo and started poking around, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought Spend a…

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor. A colleague says, “His physical appearance doesn’t tell you how tough he is.” Credit Photograph by James Day At eight-thirty on the morning of June 21st, Alan Rusbridger, the unflappable editor of the Guardian , Britain’s liberal daily, was in his office,…

Quick Hits What Should I Read on Vacation?: A Question I Never Took Lightly Again By posted at 12:00 pm on April 24, 2013 1. I’m deciding which books to take on a trip to Austin next week. I get excited every time I choose a new book to read, obviously, but I get especially keyed up about choosing…

Before Daniel Radcliffe became the most famous child actor in history, he was just a child: an only child, a poor sleeper, a nonstop talker, a picky eater. He was also disarmingly sweet. In the screen test he took at age 10, in 2000, for the first Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s…

Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee; drawing by James Ferguson 1. In 1898, the Boston writer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a memoir entitled Cheerful Yesterdays . One of the memories that cheered him was of lying before the hearth while his mother read aloud. As for “the children of…

We need to teach our children to pay attention. Photo by Shutterstock There is no doubt that “diminished attention” is a correct diagnosis of the intellectual temperament of our age. I see it to a greater degree each year even in the students I teach, who are among the very best that our high…

LOS ANGELES — AS children return to school this fall and sign up for a new year’s worth of extracurricular activities, parents should keep one question in mind. Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the program organizers this: “Which kids get awards?” If the answer is, “Everybody…

I n the backroom of a tattoo parlor on North La Brea Avenue in L.A., Miley Cyrus is about to get some new ink. "All right, face down," says the tattoo artist, a bald guy named Mojo. Miley flips onto her stomach and sticks her ass in the air. On the bottom of her dirty feet, in ballpoint pen, are…

The first decade in the life of a Canadian girl

Does the Fame Virus plague our youth, and is multimedia to blame?

O n the last day of her life, Audrie Pott walked through a crucible of teenage torment. A curvaceous sophomore at Saratoga High School, dressed in the cool-girl's uniform of a low-cut top and supershort skirt, she looked the same as always, but inside she was quivering with humiliation. In the week…

Getty Images Follow @TIMEHealth Kevin Hines paced along the Golden Gate Bridge, trying to figure out whether to obey the voices in his head urging him to jump. Anyone paying the slightest attention to Hines should’ve seen that something was horribly wrong. Sure enough, after about a half-hour, a…