Jeanne Marie Laskas

As Jeanne Marie Laskas remembers her friendship with Fred Rogers, she recalls his obsession with “the meager and the marginalized,” the universal human need to create, and his firm belief that what’s most essential about us as humans is invisible to the eye.

Jeanne Marie Laskas goes behind the scenes in the Whitehouse mailroom where it took “50 staff members, 36 interns, and a rotating roster of 300 volunteers” to read and process the 10,000 messages and letters President Barack Obama received each day during his eight-year presidency. Of the 10,000 pieces of correspondence, staffers were charged with choosing the ten letters that Obama read each day.

A sobering behind-the-scenes look at the antiquated system for tracing gun ownership in America.

What life is like today for Buzz Aldrin, a war hero, MIT rocket scientist, and the second man to walk on the moon.

Richard Norris became disfigured after he accidentally shot himself in the face when he was 22. He successfully received a full face transplant with the help of Eduardo Rodriguez, a Baltimore reconstructive facial surgeon, but life after the surgery has brought up some unexpected burdens.

Meet the hit man who also teaches Sunday school. “Special Agent Charles Hunt” is paid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to pose as a hit man. He’s hired by people you might, and might not, expect:

There are of course lunatics who come up with painfully stupid ideas: A convicted rapist in Florida wants the judge who sentenced him killed, and so he orders a hit, from prison. But there are also people with higher standing in the community: An Air Force sergeant wants help eliminating someone who heard him threaten his squadron leaders. An entrepreneur in Kentucky, facing a financial setback, thinks about having the hit man blow up his movie theater with his business partner in it, but decides instead to just have him killed at home (tonight). Love often plays a predominant role in the stories of people who hire hit men. The jilted and the scorned. The hopeless and the desperate: A woman in New Jersey wants her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend shot in the head (“Gone, gone to the moon”) and the boyfriend shot in the foot. She’s already picked out her black funeral outfit. Women. Men. Old. Young. This race or that.

An in-depth look into the life of the Vice President—and the question of 2016:

“‘He wants to be the best vice president ever,’ staffers told me, months ago, when I first started spending time with Joe Biden. That was all the talk last winter. Hillary would almost certainly be the nominee, not Biden, they said, whenever the 2016 issue came up, which wasn’t often. But then, abruptly, Biden’s stock started steeply rising, at least in the eyes of the public. Washington had been hyperventilating about the fiscal cliff, and Obama sent Biden in to broker a deal. Then came the killings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Obama sent Biden out to rally the public, Biden in to reason with Congress, Biden over to talk to the NRA. In 2013, Biden has emerged increasingly more visibly potent than his boss. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL VICE PRESIDENT IN HISTORY? one headline proffered.

“‘Well, he would be crazy not to keep his options open,’ staffers started saying then, whenever the 2016 issue came up. Which still wasn’t often. The parlor game was not my reason for being there. I wanted to get to know Biden. I wanted to understand why ‘President Joe Biden’ has such a preposterous ring to it, and I wanted to know if he knew it did.”

Wash the apple before you bite into it, because that’s the way you were raised. Germs, pesticides, dirt, gunk, it doesn’t matter—just wash it. The fingerprints, too, go down the drain with the rest. It’s easy to forget that there are people who harvest our food. Sometimes, maybe, we are reminded of the seasons and the sun and the way of the apple tree, and if we multiply that by millions of apple trees, times millions of tomato plants, times all the other fruits and vegetables, we realize, holy potato chips, that’s a lot of picking. Without 1 million people on the ground, on ladders, in bushes—armies of pickers swooping in like bees—all the tilling, planting, and fertilizing of America’s $144 billion horticultural production is for naught. The fruit falls to the ground and rots.

When Jeanne Marie Laskas started reporting on the devastating impact of repeated hits to football players’ brains in 2009, the NFL was still in denial. By now the evidence is irrefutable, and every bloody Sunday (and Monday and Thursday) it becomes a little harder not to cringe with each collision. But if you’re a guy like former star linebacker Fred McNeill who’s living with the effects of those hits, the question is: How can we keep watching the game—and how can we keep asking our kids to play it?

According to Lou Dobbs, we’ve been completely wrong about him. Wrong about his stance on illegal immigrants. Wrong about his reasons for quitting CNN after twenty-seven years. And wrong about his newfound political aspirations. Well, we might actually be right about that last thing.