The author travels to Mexico to meet a retired assassin and kidnapper, now himself a target of the cartels that once employed him.

The right to choose in Rapid City, South Dakota.

A longtime Harper’s contributor considers America as he dies: “When I died, I died of many things: the failing systems; the weakening of age; the exhaustion of the long war against dying. Finally, I succumbed to the lack of ethics in a California hospital, killed by filth and neglect.”

Undercover as a student at Phoenix University, the largest for-profit higher education company in the country and the second-largest enroller of students (behind the SUNY system), where only 12 percent of first-time students graduate and the ad budget accounts for 30 percent of overall spending.

In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently in a storm dumping a load of plastic floatee 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 El Salvador, pregnant women have more to fear than Zika.

The changing face of Appalachia.

On the public schools of Detroit.

Life as an Olympic-level archer.

It’s legal to buy poppy seeds in America and it’s legal to plant them—unless you’re familiar with the simple process of turning them into opium, that is. Then having poppies in your garden is a felony.

A bus tour through Israel with a conservative radio host and 450 of his biggest fans.

The hard luck stories of Trump fans in Florida, New Hampshire, and Iowa, including that of a man who legally changed his name to Donald Trump Jr.

A man’s search for his kidnapped children in India and Nepal.

On the rise of Marine Le Pen, France’s right-wing presidential candidate.

A trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

“A paean 2 Prince.”

Jay Miscovich spent his life wanting to hunt for treasure. In 2010, after just a few months of trying, he found half a billion dollars worth of emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic. A few years later he killed himself.

A suburban teen attempts to build a reactor, radioactivity ensues.

Letters from a jailed French jihadi.

A doctor who helped pioneer Oregon’s Death With Dignity law receives his own terminal diagnosis.

Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic.

On the stories we tell ourselves about happiness and the indecent questions we ask women who decided not to become moms.

The writer’s relationship with two Moroccan prostitutes.