Some of the most popular and profitable stories today are based on characters created and developed by authors and artists at Marvel Comics. Douglas Wolk has read all 27,000 issues to unpack the hopes, anxieties, and cultural aspirations in their half-million pages.

The rise of instant updates from today’s online news sources have left many to regard the local newspaper as a thing of the past. But Art Cullen describes how he and his family have kept Iowa’s Storm Lake Times newspaper alive and prosperous in the digital age.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw war coming with Hitler’s Germany even as he reconciled the isolationism of American politics with his own internationalist instinct. Ambassador David McKean tells the story of FDR’s personal reliance on his hand-picked ambassadors to Europe in the critical years before America’s entry into World War II.

Most Americans want to believe that the United States of America as a bastion of liberal democracy. But Michael Paul Williams is a columnist whose work exposes the illiberal elements in American society, including white supremacy, banning books, and vigilantism.

According to the CDC, more than 588,000 Americans have died from opioid overdose since 1999. Danny Strong tells the story of that epidemic in “Dopesick,” a new series on Hulu.