The 20 soldiers in Second Platoon try in vain to hold down a strategic outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, “among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces.”

A profile of the famed photographer.

When they met, he was 45 and she was 17. In her 14 years as his mistress, she appeared in countless paintings, including Guernica.

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine?

On Elizabeth Taylor at the height of her fame.

An artifact from the era when MySpace was king.

The surreal afterlife of the once-ascendant Dubai, where “the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.”

“If 4chan sounds trivial, that’s because it is. The site certainly doesn’t make much money…In fact, you could say that 4chan has cornered the market on the trivial on the Internet, which is no small feat (the trivial usually spreads by accident on the Web, according to no logic).”

A profile of Jack Dorsey, co-founder (and displaced CEO) of Twitter. Dorsey’s latest venture, a mobile credit card system called Square that only officially launched in February 2011, already processes more than a million transactions per day.

“While its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.”

Five years ago, Mel Gibson was one of Hollywood’s few genuine family-men and a leading box office attraction; inside his wild descent from star to pariah.

How the Weinstein Brothers barked their way into an empire and then lost it.

How a nation went bankrupt. “Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place.”

In 1998, at age 45, Ken Bradshaw surfed the tallest wave in recorded history.

J.D. Salinger on the beaches on D-Day, marching through concentration camps, and in liberated Paris.

A quasi-oral history of the party that was JFK’s 1961 inauguration.

The enigmatic life and death of Bruno Zehnder, who obsessively photographed penguins in the ice fields outside of a Russian base in Antarctica.

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba; the U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes. The truth is more complicated.

The backstory on Julian Assange’s relationship with the Guardian and the New York Times.

On the (disputed) origins of the Huffington Post.

Inside Office 39, a state-run counterfeiting operation designed to keep Kim Jong-il flush.

He called himself “TheNoseDoctor” and performed sinus surgeries, many of them unnecessary, at a maniacal clip. When the whole thing fell apart, he left behind his yacht and family, and disappeared into the Alps.

In 1975, Jackie O., widow to a president and tycoon, decided to become a literary editor.

On the gap between how the world sees Goldman Sachs and how Goldman Sachs sees itself.

Steven Seagal spent a few years in Japan and  returned to open a dojo in L.A.. Jules Nasso was the wiseguy producer behind all of Seagal’s hits. When it all fell apart, Seagal reputedly offered money for a contract killing, and Nasso may have been caught on tape arranging to extort Seagal through the Gambino Family.