We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.

I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, What are we afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that is what I’m interested in.”

A young, shackled black man is shot to death — and the police say he killed himself. The resulting investigation has pitted the victim’s father against the most powerful man in New Iberia, La.

Over four months, a methane well in southern California’s Aliso Canyon leaked Lebanon’s equivalent of yearly emissions into the atmosphere. No one knows what the long-term effects will be.

Rob Billot spent eight years defending corporate clients in environmental cases. Then Wilbur Tennant called.

A plague leads sea stars to tear off their own arms.

“Since 1932, the Gulf of Mexico has swallowed 2,300 square miles of the state’s wetlands, an area larger than Delaware. If no action is taken, the missing Delaware will become a missing Connecticut, and then a missing Vermont.”

Going undercover with David Sullivan, cult infiltrator.

How the ski town of the super-rich is responding to global warming.

He murdered his parents. Then he threw a party.

Inside the most sensational murder in the history of study abroad.

Three boys falsely accused of murder, and what the twenty-year saga says about all of us.

A journey on the Sunset Limited, which ferries people from Louisiana to California.

On commercial diving, the third most deadly profession.

A species of jellyfish that can transform itself back to a polyp at any time appears to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

The changing landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans:

There have been sightings of armadillos, coyotes, owls, hawks, falcons and even a four-foot alligator, drinking from a leaky fire hydrant. Rats have been less of a problem lately because of the stray cats and the birds of prey. But it’s not just animals that emerge from the weeds.

Why your phone may (or may not) be killing you.