How business incentives impact local economies.

Army Spc. Erik Schei was shot in the head in Iraq. This is the story of his recovery.

The decades-long saga of Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife.

“The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here.”

The complete (to date) New York Times series on the globalization of high tech industries.

Vegetables are “blue” in Japanese and other observations on the uneasy relationship between color and language.

Scott Raab’s ongoing reports on the reconstruction at the World Trade Center site.

The story of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The history and reception of progressive rock.

An investigation into the global human tissue trade.

Last year, 1 million gallons of diluted bitumen flooded the town of Marshall, Mich. An investigation into “the biggest oil spill you’ve never heard of.”

A 17,000-word exploration of the Sahara Desert.

How a Harvard-educated neurologist, a courtly southern gentlemen, and a Hollywood rent boy ended up at the center of an international manhunt that spread from the staid business community of Columbus, Ohio to the coffee shops of Amsterdam.

A three-part investigation into New Jersey’s halfway house system.

The anatomy of a wrongful conviction in Texas.

A multi-part series exploring Louisiana’s role as “the world’s prison capital.”

Between 2003 and 2011, there were 50 “invisible” fatalities at cell towers, “a death rate roughly 10 times that of construction.”

Carlos De Luna, convicted of murdering gas station clerk Wanda Lopez, was executed in 1989. But was another man named Carlos actually guilty of the crime?

An investigation into McWane, Inc., “one of the most dangerous employers in America.”

The author muses on the markers we use to identify ourselves and other people – from names to photographs to fingerprints.

A profile of Laura Knight, a Florida mother of five who investigates the paranormal.

In 1981, Randall Smith murdered two hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Twenty-seven years later, he tried to do it again.

A fingerprint expert spends decades investigating the death of an unidentified boy found in the woods in 1957.

Enbridge, Inc. spilled more than a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River. Was John Bolenbaugh fired for refusing to cover this up?

Life and death inside a NATO hospital in Afghanistan.

A six-day hoax in which the newspaper fooled its readers into believing that life had been found on the moon.

The long legal saga of Kerry Max Cook, who was convicted of murdering Linda Jo Edwards in 1977 and sent to death row. After three trials, two overturned convictions and a plea deal, Cook is out of prison but still has the crime on his record. He maintains his innocence.

His horror story is emblematic of a bigger problem that lawmakers in Florida and across the nation have only recently begun to recognize: Cops employ confidential informants — sometimes very young ones — to bust criminals. But there's little oversight, and the result of police carelessness can be horrific.

Forty years ago, a man was killed in Chicago because he was black. The daughter he never met is still searching for clues about his death.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of group homes for the retarded in Washington, D.C.

The son of Jim Nicholson, a former CIA agent convicted of espionage, follows in his father’s footsteps.

A travelogue of a three-month tour of Muay Thai boxing camps in Thailand. The author, 28, died in a hit-and-run shortly after returning to the U.S.

In 1988, 59 fifth graders in Washington D.C. were promised a free college education. This is the story of what followed.

A great journalist’s greatest magazine stories.

After being interrogated by the Worcester Police, Nga Truong confessed to smothering her baby.

There’s an entire micro-economy based on the pursuit of betterment. The author—58, full-figured, and ferocious in his consumption of cigarettes and scotch—agreed to test its limits.

Dead of an accidental overdose at 28, Derek Boogaard rose from Western Canada’s rugged youth leagues to become on of Hockey’s most feared pugilists. Along the way, what happened to his brain?

On a prison hospice in California.

How the medical research industry came to almost exclusively use rodents for testing—and the danger that reliance now poses to human health.

A profile of Ahmet Ertegun: son of the Turkish ambassador, teenage collector of ‘race’ music, producer and pseudonymous songwriter for records by Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner, founder of Atlantic Records, confidante to Mick Jagger, impeccable dresser.

A history of Grove Press and its publisher Barney Rosset.

Built on a foundation of debt and trickery, where economic principles were sacrificed to romantic political visions, the Euro has become the world’s most dangerous currency. How the utopian dream of a common currency turned tragic.

Retracing Hunter S. Thompson’s famous steps, 40 years later.

His complete financial disaster tourism series for Vanity Fair, to date.

The Sinaloa cartel was flooding cocaine across the border. The DEA was listening. A four-part series based on hundreds of pages of transcripts from intercepted calls, court testimony, and investigative reports.

An investigation of human trafficking and the international sex trade.

The full list of winners by category.

It was the confluence of two streams of development that transformed Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber. One stream was personal, fed by his anger toward his family and those who he felt had slighted or hurt him, in high school and college. The other derived from his philosophical critique of society and its institutions, and reflected the culture of despair he encountered at Harvard and later.

Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a longtime Reuters reporter based in Thailand, resigned and forfeited his ability to enter the country in order to report on the revelations about the Thai royal family and military contained within the Wikileaks “Cablegate” dump.

Thailand has the world's harshest lèse majesté law. Any insult to Bhumibol, Queen Sirikit or their son Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, is punishable by three to 15 years in jail.

The cables reveal a toxic power struggle between elected officials, the military, and the monarchy, with the huge shadow of exiled telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra looming over the country’s post-King Bhumibol future.

The impending end of his reign has sparked intense national anxiety in Thailand. King Bhumibol's son and heir, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, has a reputation for being a cruel and corrupt womanizer. A notorious video showing a birthday party for his pet poodle Foo Foo -- who holds the rank of Air Chief Marshal -- has been widely circulated in Thailand; in it, the prince's third wife, Princess Srirasmi, dressed only in a thong, eats the dog's birthday cake off the floor while liveried servants look on.

Editor's Note: Marshall’s findings will be published as a 4-part series, hosted here by the permission of the author, and re-publishable through a Creative Commons license. His writings on the topic have already reached near book length, for a good overview, see Marshall's introduction in Foreign Policy.

A Monrovia travelogue:

Even Liberia's roots are sunk in bad faith. Of the first wave of emigrants, half died of yellow fever. By the end of the 1820s a small colony of 3,000 souls survived. In Liberia they built a facsimile life: plantation-style homes, white-spired churches. Hostile local Malinke tribes resented their arrival and expansion; sporadic armed battle was common. When the ACS went bankrupt in the 1840s, they demanded the 'Country of Liberia' declare its independence.

It was one of the most brutal attacks the cops had ever seen. It also might have sent an innocent man to prison.

A four-part investigation of brothers William and James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. One was president of the Massachusetts Senate for 17 years. The other was on the lam for 16 before being captured Wednesday in Santa Monica.

Noel Morris’s place in history? Noel Morris was my older brother, who had dropped out of MIT and spent most of his waking hours holed up in an apartment working at a computer terminal. This was in the ‘60s, long before there was anything close to a home computer. The name Tom Van Vleck was not unfamiliar. He was a friend of my brother’s who worked with him at MIT in those days. I called him.

A two-part breakdown of how mental illness is diagnosed and treated.

"For example, I remember reading Hemingway and loving his work so much—but then at some point, realizing that my then-current life (or parts of it) would not be representable via his prose style. Living in Amarillo, Texas, working as a groundsman at an apartment complex, with strippers for pals around the complex, goofball drunks recently laid off from the nuclear plant accosting me at night when I played in our comical country band, a certain quality of West Texas lunatic-speak I was hearing, full of way off-base dreams and aspirations—I just couldn’t hear that American in Hem-speak. And that kind of moment is gold for a young writer: the door starts to open, just a crack."

America's fascination with murder has not yet extended to its aftermath. As a result, the victims' survivors must seek comfort from one another.

Inside Florence, Colorado’s ADX prison, possibly one of the most isolated places on Earth, where Tommy Silverstein has spent the last 27 years without human contact.

As announced last night. Click here for the full list of nominees.

NYT journalist David Rohde’s alternately terrifying and absurd first person account of his kidnapping en route to an interview in Southern Afghanistan and the subsequent seven months he, along with his translator and driver, spent in captivity in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Twenty-five years ago, a guru from India showed up in rural Oregon with 2,000 followers. Here’s what happened next: they legally turned their multi-million dollar ranch into an incorporated city, imported homeless people to swing local votes, poisoned hundreds and attempted to assassinate the state’s U.S. attorney.

Despite no hurricanes in five years, Florida insurers are demanding yet more money from homeowners. At the same time, the capital that insurers have on hand to pay claims has shrunk. One reporter spent a year trying to figure out why.

A series on how some Wall Street bankers, seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of their clients and sometimes even their own firms, at first delayed but then worsened the financial crisis.

On a particularly bloody April weekend in 2008 when 40 people were shot, seven fatally. Not one has faced charges.

Nicholas Volker is a little boy with a rare, devastating disease. In a desperate bid to save his life, Wisconsin doctors must decide: Is it time to push medicine’s frontier?

On the 2009 sinking of a scallop boat; a newly minted Pulitzer winner.

On Russia’s faltering justice system.

Eichmann’s escape to Buenos Aires and his surprisingly visible life upon arrival:

"I was no ordinary recipient of orders. If I had been one, I would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thought process. I was an idealist."

As announced today.

As announced today.

As announced today.

As announced today.

As announced today.

A two-part account of the recent elections in Uganada and the unlikely candidacy of Rabbi Gershom Sizomu Wambedde, the leader of a small community of Ugandan Jews.

“My name is Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., and my name is also Abdul Kareem, but I’ll explain about that much later.” A three-part personal essay on basketball, family, race and religion.

A series of first-person essays on a reporter’s relationship with his city. Excerpted from the upcoming Detroit: An American Autopsy.

A year-by-year walk through of the decade that birthed a mainstream culture called ‘Alternative’ and the bands that were deified and destroyed by it.

A series on the U.S. intelligence system.