I first encountered Robert Crumb at my local Blockbuster, in the mid-Nineties, when Crumb became available for rental. I wasn’t more than ten at the time, so I didn’t understand that the movie was a ...

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean ...

I n every city there is a district which is called “tough” — a district which decent people, afraid of insult or theft, shun in both daylight and darkness. It… ...

From Chariot, published in May by Wave Books. I have aspired to the ease of the drink-steadied harper who lives the tune so thoroughly his fast pink hands dance over… ...

From Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact and Fiction, which will be published next month by W. W. Norton and Company. Waste seemed like all I knew when I was… ...

Meet the mobsters who run the show in one of the world’s deadliest cities ...

From messages sent to NASA’s “Ask an Astrobiologist” Web page. David Morrison, who responds to the questions, has received more than 5,000 messages related to “Doomsday 2012” and the planet… ...

From an October meeting held during the trial of Paul Bellar, Joseph Morrison, and Pete Musico in Michigan’s Fourth Circuit Court. The men were accused of assisting in a plot… ...

Meet the mobsters who run the show in one of the world’s deadliest cities ...

Baltimore records its highest monthly murder total since 1971, Oklahoma police shoot an assistant pastor, and 30 people are kicked out of a hotel for fighting over a waffle maker.

A decade ago, when my fiancée and I were living in a semilegal converted nylon factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and I’d just published my first book—a coming-of-age memoir into which… ...

Drawn by P.D. Johnson, ...