“You are reading this because you have no idea what NASA is doing. And NASA, tongue-tied by jargon, can’t figure out how to tell you. But the agency is engaged in work that can be more enduring and far-reaching than anything else this country is paying for.”

One rabbi’s tactics against husbands who refuse to divorce their wives.

Louis Scarcella was a star New York City detective in the ’80s and ’90s, cracking cases no one else could. Now it appears that many of the people he put away were innocent, forced into false confessions and convicted with testimony from flimsy witnesses. Scarcella maintains that he did nothing wrong, despite evidence against him much stronger than in many of his cases.

The postscript to a miracle.

“Like they said in Step Brothers: Never lose your dinosaur. This is the ultimate example of a person never losing his dinosaur. Meaning that even as I grew in cultural awareness and respect and was put higher in the class system in some way for being this musician, I never lost my dinosaur.”

The preacher ran a prostitution ring out of his halfway house. The teenager posed as his nephew and later claimed he feared for his own life. Only one man they drove into the woods would survive.

The Maroon 5 singer discusses douchebaggery.

“What kind of a person looks upon the world’s largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying ‘Wow!’ says something like ‘Where’s my gun?’”

Making vision boards with rap’s strangest fallen star.

On the decline of America.

A Little League season in Camden, New Jersey, where the murder rate is 17 times the national average.

On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.

A profile of photographer Ryan McGinley.

A profile of Valeria Lukyanova, otherwise known as the “Human Barbie.”

On Michael Jackson’s talent.

On the burrneshas of Albania.

Inside BuzzFeed’s adorable animal machine.

Life after The Real World.

The coordinated government attack on queer Russia.

A profile of the Hot 97 DJ a few months after “he told the truth about who he is, even if it’s not entirely clear—even to Mister Cee himself, even now, to this day—what exactly that truth is.”

A profile of the first and only transgender MMA fighter.

Eleven members of an Australian rugby club traveled to Bali. After a bomb went off at a nightclub, only five of them made it home.

Visiting Cambodia, and a Khmer Rouge prison camp, 30 years after the genocide.

The trial of a 10-year-old who murdered his neo-Nazi father.

They advertise murder for hire but work for the government. Inside the world of America’s fake hit men.