Inside the lives of Sri Lanka’s Tamils as they emerge from a multi-decade war that defined and nearly destroyed them.

Getting the married man back to her place was the easy part.

A insider account of the British real-estate business from 20-year industry veteran.

In tragedy’s wake, a man tries methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

Serial infidelity is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it’s really expensive.

“And finally, to girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you.”

On the visionary architects who, along with an extremely helpful tax break, gave birth to the American mall.

A writer tries to make sense of a national landmark.

Over the last five years, so-called “sweepstakes cafes,” known in Las Vegas and elsewhere as “casinos,” have opened in malls from Florida to Massachusetts. On the law-bending rise of a $10 billion industry.

The soap opera of an off-brand mall in West Houston.

How Hollister employs the dark art of “immersive retail” to bring the allure of the mall to its flagship store in New York.

Spending time with the Tonya Harding Fan Club in the wake of the assault on Nancy Kerrigan.

Confessions of a white-collar heroin addict.

Remembering the loss of a parent and the birth of an addiction.

A father on his son’s meth problem.

Three years lost to Grand Theft Auto.

Giving yourself over to poker.

On quitting cigarettes.

Seventy-five years after its founding, it’s still hard to explain exactly why Alcoholics Anonymous works.

For 18 months, Coatesville, Penn., was besieged with an improbable number of arsons. But who started the fires—and why?

The arson case that led Texas to execute an almost certainly innocent man.

Living through a Colorado fire that burned down 169 homes.

Ten churches are torched in East Texas. The culprits? Two Baptist teens having a crisis of faith.

Thomas Sweatt torched D.C. for decades and was finally jailed for killing one person. During a year-long correspondence from prison with a reporter, he confessed there were more.

It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.

The Granite Mountain Hotshots, an outfit of professional wildland firefighters, had 20 members. On June 30, 19 of them lost their lives.

A rookie firefighter confronts his first test.

How Sherwin Shayegan pulled off a 3,000-mile, piggyback ride-fueled journey.

On the road with John Coster-Mullen, a truck driver who reverse engineered the atomic bomb.

A wandering summer road trip.

A Liberian road trip with the creator of MTV, Ralph Reed, and a reformed cannibal named General Butt Naked.

The Great Railway Bazaar author drives across the country.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

On his last night, Williams lay dying in the back of a blue Cadillac, with 17-year-old Charles Carr at the wheel.

A cross-country drive with the first head writer of Saturday Night Live.

Writing in his mid-30s—and, it’s worth noting, in 1969—the scientist breaks down the many pleasures he’s found in getting high.

A journey inside California’s medical marijuana industry, with a guide named Captain Blue.

A trip to the Cannabis Cup serves as a backdrop for an explanation of how the War on Drugs revolutionized the way marijuana is grown in America.

The story of how a 19-year-old kid in Idaho went from delivering pizza to leading a operation responsible for smuggling at least seven tons of marijuana across the Canadian border.

On marijuana’s impact on national politics, the economy, and the prison system.

Looking for a glimpse of America’s possibly legalized future, a reporter spends a week working at an Amsterdam coffee shop (and confronts his fear of weed, kind of).

A journey to Disney World with kids and weed.

How a group of hippie surfers and a former Spanish teacher built the largest weed-smuggling empire on the West Coast.

One man’s dream to turn America into a post-prohibition wine utopia.

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

Fred Franzia makes a lot of money selling really cheap wine.

The rare-wine world gets conned.

Investigating whether or not anyone can really tell them apart.

A profile of wine critic Robert Parker.

On wine’s sacred and profane history.

The Spanish police believed he was a missing American teen. So, seemingly, did the Texas family who had lost him three years prior. Who they had actually found was Frédéric Bourdin, was a 23-year-old Frenchman on the run.

He was an 18-year-old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad started contacting her. No one was who they claimed to be.

For nearly a decade, Laura Albert lived a double life as troubled teen turned cult writer JT LeRoy, writing books, chatting constantly with celebrities, and convincing another woman to appear as JT LeRoy in public.

Jerry Joseph showed up in a small Texas town seemingly out of nowhere, produced a birth certificate that said he was of age, and quickly became a star for the local high-school basketball team. It was a role he’d played before.

The story of Alan Young, a career con whose go-to move was to pose as a member of the Temptations and smooth-talk his way into luxury hotel rooms and limo rides.

When a man named Clark Rockefeller snatched his daughter during a custody dispute, what the D.A. called “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career” unraveled.

Ray Bowman and Billy Kirkpatrick, who began boosting together as teenagers, were arrested only twice during their prolific partnership. The first time was for stealing 38 records from a K-Mart in 1974. The second arrest came in 1997. In between, Bowman and Kirkpatrick robbed 27 banks, including the single biggest haul in United States history: $4,461,681 from the Seafirst Bank in suburban Tacoma.

Peggy Jo Tallas, a soft-spoken bachelorette, spent much of her adult life doing two things: taking care of her ailing mother and robbing bank after bank dressed as a pudgy, bearded cowboy.

Anthony Curcio was the pride of his small town in Washington state. A former football star, he had married his high-school sweetheart and was making good money flipping houses. Then the real estate market crashed, and Curcio turned his obsessive attention to planning an ingenious heist involving Craigslist, an inner tube, and $400,000.

The robbers had a helicopter, explosives, and inside information on a $150 million cash repository. But the police were on to them—sort of.

A young man named John Wojtowicz, desperate to provide for his children and finance his lover’s sex-change surgery, attempts to rob a Chase branch in Brooklyn. The bank is surrounded almost immediately and a 14-hour standoff ensues. The story inspired Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon.

In 2003, a man named Brian Wells robbed a bank in Erie, Pa., with a bomb around his neck. Shortly thereafter, with Wells surrounded by cops and claiming he’d been forced to commit the crime, the bomb detonated, leaving authorities to piece together who had put it there. Eight years later, they’re still not entirely sure who was behind this bizarre crime, or even the true motive.

How a 24-year-old nurse discovered Vegas, high-stakes gambling, and serial bank robbery.

On the start of the high school football season in Odessa, Texas. An adaptation published alongside the release of Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name, which led to the movie and the show.

Her suicide made headlines around the world after classmates were indicted on felony charges related to bullying, but the real story wasn’t that simple.

At age 22, the author went undercover at his old high school. An excerpt of the book that became the film.

Mr. Lindwall was the only high school teacher who understood him. Then Mr. Lindwall went to jail, and it was his turn to try to understand.

Sixteen years after graduating, an alumnus heads back to his old stomping grounds in Cleveland.

How two love-struck, type-A high school students almost got away with murder.

Navigating life as a brilliant teenage girl.

The profile of a 34-year-old woman named Charity Johnson who tricked people all over the country into believing she was still in high school.

An essay on a fatal car crash in the author’s youth.

The science behind why high school sucks.

In 2007, Harrah’s made 5.6 percent of its total Las Vegas revenue off a single person: Terrance Watanabe.

A story of gambling addiction, in seven parts.

“On a small scale, Titanic Thompson is an American legend. I say on a small scale, because an overpowering majority of the public has never heard of him. That is the way Titanic likes it. He is a professional gambler. He has sometimes been called the gambler’s gambler.”

In 1980, a bankrupt gambler came up with a plan to get his money back. He built an incredibly complex bomb, one that was impossible to defuse and that only he knew how to move, and snuck it into a Lake Tahoe casino with an extortion note demanding $3 million. Part of the plan worked. Part of it did not.

How Billy Walters, the world’s most successful gambler, keeps winning.

On playing chess and waiting to get arrested.

“Again I ask, Is this really the way the American people want it to be?”

The men who say they’ll try to save the once-bustling gambling resort town.

An obsessive marine biologist gambles his savings, family, and sanity on a quest to be the first to capture a live giant squid.

A trip to a lobster festival leads to an examination of the culinary and ethical dimensions of cooking a live, possibly sentient, creature.

Stalking the disappearing bluefin tuna, the world’s most valuable wild animal.

A trip to Scotland and an investigation of enduring belief.

On the mysterious and moderately intelligent giant Pacific octopus.

A profile of a celebrity whale.

In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently in a storm dumping a load of plastic floating infant toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—to the open sea. This is their story.

In February 2010, a killer whale named Tilikum dragged his SeaWorld trainer into the pool and drowned her. It was the third time the orca had been involved in a death during his 27 years in captivity. This is his story.

The story of the loneliest whale in the world.

An essay on insomnia.

We know we need sleep. We just don’t know why.

Coming to grips with night terrors.

The state of sleep research and what Americans’ unprecedented lack of shuteye may mean in the long run.

On Ambien and the search for the next blockbuster insomnia drug.

A profile of a young Steve Prefontaine.

A 16-year-old runner, her coach and the lasting memory of an improbable race.

The strange case of Kip Litton, road race fraud.

On the world’s longest foot race, which takes place entirely within Queens.

He rose from poverty to fame as a marathon champion at only 23. But was his fall from a balcony outside of Nairobi murder, accident, or suicide?

A profile of 101-year-old marathoner Fauja Singh.

At age 17, Bonnie Richardson won the Texas state track team championship all by herself. Then she did it again.

In Mexico’s remote Copper Canyon, the Tarahumara Indians party hard, get by on a diet of carbs and beer, and can still run 100-mile races, even in their 60s.

His brain and body shattered in a horrible accident as a young boy, Bret Dunlap thought just being able to hold down a job, keep an apartment, and survive on his own added up to a good enough life. Then he discovered running.

If you walk into New York’s best restaurants without a reservation, what does it take to get a table?

David Chang’s manic quest for a flawless restaurant.

An essay on waiting tables.

An interview with Alan Stillman, who in 1965 founded T.G.I. Friday’s, the first singles bar in America.

Mysterious, man-made “natural flavor” explains why most fast food—indeed, most of the food Americans eat—tastes the way it does. An early excerpt from Fast Food Nation.

A minute-by-minute account of what it takes to run a restaurant.

America’s underground Chinese restaurant workers.

The creator of the California-based food chain kills his mother, sister and, finally, himself.

The first modern games were staged in 1850 by a surgeon named William Penny Brookes in a town called Much Wenlock.

An American gold medalist in the hurdles describes his experience at the 1896 Olympics in Athens.

On the scene of the darkest games in Olympic history.

Three years after her gold-medal performance—and amidst rumors of a fall from grace—the author travels to Transylvania to track down gymnast Nadia Comaneci. He also enjoys several drinks with her coach, Béla Károlyi.

On the eve of the 1992 Summer Olympics, the Dream Team held a closed-door scrimmage in Monaco. Michael Jordan led one team, Magic Johnson the other. Two decades later, a game report.

How the media and law enforcement fingered the wrong man for the 1996 Olympic Park bombing.

Sex in the Olympic Village.

How science is “helping athletes approach perfection.”

How the government cleared the streets in advance of the 1988 Olympics.

After losing his sight at age 3, Michael May went on to become the first blind CIA agent, set a world record for downhill skiing and start a successful Silicon Valley company. Then he got the chance to see again.

One killer’s creepy obsession.

Daniel Kish had his eyes removed at age 1 because he was born with retinoblastoma, a cancer that attacks the retinas. But many people would never guess that he is blind.

The perspective-bending art of identical twins Trevor and Ryan Oakes.

Captain Iván Castro lost his vision in Iraq, but that didn’t stop him from running marathons.

The allure of invisibility.

How 3-D images affect the eye, plus proof that viewers have hated the technology since at least 1953.

How animals see.

On Timothy Treadwell, later immortalized in Grizzly Man, who lived and died by the bears of Alaska.

The life story of Travis the chimp and the family of tow truck operators who raised him like a human child before it all ended in tragedy.

The life story of Tilikum, a killer whale who dragged his SeaWorld trainer into the pool and drowned her in 2010. It was the third time the orca had been involved in a death during his 27 years in captivity.

Encountering a pack of wild dogs in Manhattan.

“Joe’s hand began to tingle, and he called the group together. The toxins would leave his system in 48 hours, he said. He’d be conscious the whole time.”

After two people are found dead in Yellowstone National Park, a team of investigators tracks down the unlikely culprit: a grizzly bear.

A profile of a previously unknown rookie pitcher for the Mets who dropped out of Harvard, made a spiritual quest to Tibet, and somewhere along the line figured out how to throw a baseball much, much faster than anyone else on Earth. Also, the greatest April Fools’ Day prank in the history of journalism.

Over six days in 1835, the New York Sun reported a stunning development—life had been found on the moon.

One of the most famous fabrications in journalism history, Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer-winning invention of an 8-year-old boy with a heroin habit.

See also: Bill Green’s 14,000-word post-mortem on “Jimmy’s World.”

Nearly 20 years after its publication, Cohn revealed that his story, which was the basis for Saturday Night Fever, was a fake—a fact that still isn’t noted on New York’s website.

The definitive profile of Stephen Glass, 25-year-old wunderkind reporter and serial fabricator.

See also: Sixteen years later, a former colleague confronts Glass.

The paper of record comes clean about Jayson Blair.

There is an island in the Florida Keys, the author said, where men fish for monkeys.

There was no island, no men, and no monkeys.

On the desolate career of Todd Marinovich, who was engineered from birth to be an NFL quarterback and ended up a junkie.

A detailed account of Plimpton’s 5-play tenure as quarterback of the Detroit Lions.

Jared Lorenzen was a star quarterback in college. He won a Super Bowl. And just like the author, he has spent his entire life fighting, and losing, a battle with his weight.

The stories of the 109 black men who have played quarterback in the NFL, from Fritz Pollard to Russell Wilson.

A profile of Eli Manning—brother of Peyton, son of Archie, future Super Bowl MVP—published shortly after his first NFL start.

Catching up with Jake Plummer, who turned down a $5 million contract and left the NFL while still in his prime to concentrate on playing handball.

A profile of Tim Tebow as he dealt with NFL skeptics on the eve of his final college season.

Over a scotch a few months after his underdog Jets won Super Bowl III, a 26-year-old Joe Namath told Jimmy Breslin what he’d done the night before the game: “I went out and got a bottle and grabbed this girl.”

Growing up among the tall waves and schoolyard bullies of Hawaii.

On surfer girls in Maui: the story that led to the film Blue Crush.

A profile of Ken Bradshaw, who at 45 surfed the tallest wave in recorded history.

A visit to the massive Northern California surf break.

The underground culture of big waves and wild times in 1961 Malibu, and the gang of teenage boys who worshiped at the feet of the beach’s dark prince, surfing legend and grifter Miki Dora.

Getting away from it all in Mexico.

On surf legend Eddie Aikau and the complicated history of Hawaii.

A trip to the French island of Réunion to report on a bloody battle between surfers and sharks.

On surfing, and surfing in San Francisco, and surfing with a San Francisco surfing fanatic.

A profile of Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who invented Donkey Kong, Mario, and the Wii.

How a group of roommates in Minneapolis created the most enduring educational game ever.

Chronicling the viral spread of the early video game Spacewar through computer science departments around the country, with students hacking in their own variations on the game and passing it on, until it eventually arrived in coffee shops at 25 cents per play.

Duke Nukem 3D made its creators filthy rich. Trying to complete its sequel nearly destroyed them.

A profile of Dave Jones, the designer of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.

A “crude table-tennis arcade game” called Pong and the birth of the video game industry.

The Columbia shuttle was to be a revolution for NASA. But a year before its first launch, the shuttle was several years behind schedule, had cost $1 billion, and wasn’t guaranteed to ever get off the ground.

Sex in space.

A profile of celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The inside story of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and subsequent investigation.

An interview with Ralph Lapp, a member of the Apollo Project.

Elon Musk's dreams of colonizing Mars.

How smallpox went from eradicated disease to the ideal weapon of bioterrorists.

The author of The Hot Zone on how geneticists can help contain the current outbreak.

The story of H1N1 and John Behnken, whose life it claimed.

New York during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Living on borrowed time, with liver cancer.

Exploring the riddle of Morgellons disease: sufferers feel things crawling under their skin and hardly anyone believes them.

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran. The declassified story that became Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, media outlets including the New York Times and CBS News provided the CIA with information and cover for agents. Then everyone decided to pretend it had never happened.

Erik Prince, the boyish CEO of America’s largest and most controversial mercenary force, Blackwater, also happened to be a CIA agent.

The story of William Morgan: American, wanderer, Cuban revolutionary, possible spy.

When a CIA operation in Pakistan went bad, leaving three men dead, the episode offered a rare glimpse inside a shadowy world of espionage. It also jeopardized America’s most critical outpost in the war against terrorism.

On the CIA’s early operations.

A spy takes on his own agency.

A three-part series on the U.S. intelligence system post-9/11.