For years, the researchers painstakingly recorded and transcribed oral histories from many of the leaders of the factions caught up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They pledged absolute secrecy to their subjects until after their deaths.

Carried out under the auspices of Boston College, which was founded in the mid-1800s to serve a growing population of Irish Catholic immigrants, the project aimed to provide a definitive history of a conflict with edges so sharp that people there still fear to speak openly of what they know...

Stephanie Wilson was reaching for a receipt inside a paper shopping bag from Saks Fifth Avenue when she found a letter pleading, "HELP HELP HELP."

The message, written in blue ink on white lined paper, appeared to be a desperate cry from a man who said he made the bag while being unfairly held in a Chinese prison factory more than 7,000 miles away...

Garry B. Trudeau, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, Doonesbury, told a Memorial Auditorium audience Monday that up until 10 minutes before he took the stage, he and the Rev. Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life at Stanford and his former college roommate, had been arguing about whether he actually was qualified to be the 2014 Rathbun Visiting Fellow at Stanford, given the others who had held the title before...

Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), has never been known for the reliability of its public utilities. Most trash is picked through by scavengers, and the remaining mango pits, scraps of plastic, and rusty bottlecaps pile up on dirt roads or get blown into fetid open sewers. But since December, along a desolate stretch of the Avenue de France, the Red Cross has operated an on-demand, white-gloved sanitation service that, within an hour of being called, will show up to collect human bodies, whether chopped up or left intact...

Finally available in English, Poilu, a classic battlefield memoir by a World War I French infantryman, reveals as much as any book can about the ugly realities of war...

I went to the Tribeca Film Festival to see “The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir,” because I have always liked Bob Weir, the second guitarist of the Grateful Dead. Usually you would call such a musician a rhythm guitarist, but Weir isn’t anything like a garden-variety rhythm guitarist. To the initial exasperation of his bandmates, who wanted someone to keep time more diligently, he developed one of the most unusual styles in rock and roll, built on lyric asides and cunning contrapuntal remarks that suggest a line of melody travelling through the map of the chord changes...

Welcome to Malibu Colony, a one-mile stretch of beachfront property that has been witness to the shenanigans of the stars for over 80 years. And oh the tales these homes could tell...

Should students be warned that reading The Great Gatsby might "trigger" a past trauma? The campus censors think so. But they are only protecting your feelings...

The Nigerian militant group abducted 234 teenage girls two weeks ago. That's just the beginning...

The Washington Post ran, for the first time, a comics-page strip in which a character declared former Nixon attorney general John Mitchell guilty for Watergate crimes.

All it took was 41 years, the cartoonist’s hiatus and a “Flashback” comic that was not technically a rerun in The Post because, well, it never ran the first time...