Last fall, one of Spain’s greatest matadors took a horn to the face. It was a brutal goring, among the most horrific in the history of bullfighting. Miraculously, Juan Jose Padilla was back in the bullring—sí, fighting bulls—a mere five months later. And in the process of losing half his sight, he somehow managed to double his vision.

On his first tour of duty in Afghanistan, Sam Brown was set on fire by an improvised explosive device. He survived, only to find himself, like thousands of other vets, doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. Even hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, and little hope.

Then his doctors told him about an experimental treatment, a painkilling video game supposedly more effective than morphine. If successful, it would deliver Brown from his living hell into a strange new world—a digital winter wonderland.

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

A troubled Iraq veteran seeks out the family he harmed.

On August 13, 1986, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed. His nightmare had only begun.

During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfull imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: Someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.

Kim Dotcom is not a pirate. Kim Dotcom is a pirate.

[Requires Subscription] The gripping true story of three close friends—Tom, Ian, and Jimmy—whose courage is challenged every day as they walk the Afghan countryside with their fellow Marines, patrolling for cleverly hidden explosives that can instantly tear a man in half.

Lawbreakers, Lawmakers: In some parts of Chicago, violent street gangs and pols quietly trade money and favors for mutual gain. The thugs flourish, the elected officials thrive—and you lose.

The miracle of the great Zanesville zoo escape—which began last fall when a depressed, desperate man named Terry Thompson set free his vast collection of exotic animals—was that not a single innocent person was hurt. The incident made global news. It also thrust into daylight, if only for a brief moment, a secret world of privately owned exotic animals living off the grid, and often right next door. We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things are—and what the hell they’re doing there.

The future of Libya depends on mercy or revenge.

On the front lines of a burgeoning civil war.

On October 3, 2006, a four-year-old boy named Andrew Burd died in a Corpus Christi hospital. The cause of death was determined to be salt poisoning, an extremely unusual occurrence. Even more shocking was what happened next: his foster mother, Hannah Overton, was found guilty of killing him. But could she really have done what the prosecutors say?

Who’s killing the people of the Juarez Valley?

Election night in Peru.

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

The real war on women is in the Middle East.

The era of medical miracles has created a new phase of aging, as far from living as it is from dying. A son’s plea to let his mother go.

[Requires Subscription] What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first.

Does success spell doom for Homo sapiens?

For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

How much is too much? Federal limits don’t exist.

Our findings show a real need for federal standards for this toxin.

Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.

In Michele Bachmann’s home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

In 2011 the Legislature slashed funding for women’s health programs and launched an all-out war on Planned Parenthood that has dramatically changed the state’s priorities. A year later, the battle is still raging, and the stakes could not be higher.