She was the perfect hero: a cancer survivor baring her double-mastectomy scars on a 1,000-mile walk to Washington. Until her own words got in the way.

Last month, when President Donald Trump toured a Boeing aircraft plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, he saw a familiar face in the crowd that greeted him: Patrick Caddell, a former Democratic political operative and pollster who, for forty-five years, has been prodding insurgent Presidential candidates to attack the Washington establishment. Caddell, who lives in Charleston, is perhaps best known for helping Jimmy Carter win the 1976 Presidential race.

George W. Bush has to be high in the running for the worst president in the history of the republic, and he probably would’ve reigned unchallenged for at least a few decades had Hillary Clinton’s inept campaign not led to her defeat. As it is, the less than two months of Donald Trump’s volatile presidency suggests his full four years will at least be neck and neck with Bush’s eight. Still, Bush’s presidency was historically disastrous, which makes it understandable that since Trump’s ascent, Bush appears to be waging an understated media campaign to rehabilitate his image — one which the media has happily assisted him with.

Rather than jumping headfirst into the limitations of reason, let us start by just getting our toes wet and examining the limitations of language. Language is a tool used to describe the world in which we live. However, don’t confuse the map with the territory! There is one major difference between the world we live in and language: Whereas the real world is free of contradictions, the man-made linguistic descriptions of that world can have contradictions.

Volunteers are taking the care of their terminally ill neighbors into their own hands. Thirty years ago a young anesthetist, newly appointed as head of department at Calicut Medical College Hospital in the Indian state of Kerala, encountered a case that would change his life. A college professor aged 42 with cancer of the tongue had been referred to him by an oncologist. The man was in severe pain, and the anesthetist, M.R. Rajagopal, asked if he could help. He injected the mandibular nerve in the jaw in a procedure known as a nerve block, and told the patient to return in 24 hours.

The remarkable double life of undercover agent Jack Barsky who lived the American dream at the KGB's expense. It's no secret that the Russians have long tried to plant "sleeper agents" in the US - men and women indistinguishable from normal Americans, who live - on the surface - completely normal lives. But what happens when one of them doesn't want to go home?

Sir Paul Smith long ago earned his stripes as the quintessential British fashion designer. Today, as he enters his eighth decade, he still has plenty of tricks up his elegantly tailored sleeve (rubber chicken included).

Bryson Morris is a trap-rapping 14-year-old with one semi-viral hit. His team thinks he’ll be the next teen pop superstar. Are they delusional, or about to change the game?

First, listen to the story with the happy ending: At 61, the executive was in excellent health. His blood pressure was a bit high, but everything else looked good, and he exercised regularly. Then he had a scare. He went for a brisk post-lunch walk on a cool winter day, and his chest began to hurt. Back inside his office, he sat down, and the pain disappeared as quickly as it had come.

When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast.

A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

In November 2015, former Arizona star and New York Knicks draft pick Michael Wright was found dead in his car in Brooklyn. A year later, his longtime mentor and roommate Mark Holdbrooks was arrested for the killing. That's just the beginning of the story.

On Easter Sunday morning in 1992, just two hours after he had been speaking to a television producer about yet another comeback, and five days after being released from hospital after a heart-scare, seventy-five- year-old Frankie Howerd collapsed and died. Benny Hill, seven years younger than Howerd, was quoted in the press as being ‘very upset’ and saying, ‘We were great, great friends.’

Like most high school seniors, Abdullahi Yusuf tried to avoid hugging his father in view of other teens. But on the morning of May 28, 2014, as he was being dropped off in front of Heritage Academy in southeast Minneapolis, the rail-thin 18-year-old, who went by the nickname Bones, startled his dad with a tender good-bye embrace. Unbeknownst to his father, Yusuf believed he’d never see any member of his family again.

When novelist Michael Cunningham got a call from David Bowie, he thought it was a prank. Instead, he was launched into a yearlong collaboration on a musical involving space aliens, mariachi bands, and an imaginary trove of unreleased songs by Bob Dylan.

An exotic country goes up in flames and the world turns elsewhere for an alternate holiday destination. But in researching the chaos of our times, historians likely will keep coming back to Turkey, to pick apart an explosive collision of destructive forces, in which the more autocratic Turkish leader resident Recep Tayyip Erdogan figured he could do it all himself, the faster the country became ungovernable.

In Altansukh Purev’s yurt, the trappings of a herder’s life lie in plain sight. In the corner are his saddle and bridle. By the door, he has left a milk pail. If you didn’t know better, you might think his horses and cattle were still grazing outside on the remote plains of outer Mongolia. But they aren’t. Altansukh’s milk pail stands empty. There is no horse for him to saddle. His cattle are dead. And this tent, which once stood in the countryside, is now on the fringes of the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar, surrounded by pylons, rubble and the husks of old cars.

What started as a body-tinkering, mind-hacking, supplement-taking productivity craze in Silicon Valley is now spreading to more respectable workplaces, maybe even to your office, where the guy down the hall might already be popping a new breed of brain-boosting pills or micro-dosing LSD—all in the name of self-improvement. Can you afford not to keep up?

In 1977 a woman finally thought she had finally tracked down the son she had abandoned as a baby. What followed was an extraordinary tale of deception and heartbreak.

The bicycle was black before it was white. It lay on the pavement behind Alan Nakagawa’s house in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood. An English-style cruiser, it had fenders, a swept-back handlebar, and a wide leather seat. Nakagawa and two friends, Isaiah and Julio, got busy, pulling off the tubes and tires, disassembling the brakes, sanding the frame. Nakagawa is an artist who primarily works with sound, but on this evening his medium was paint—two cans of white Krylon ColorMaster.