How sectarian violence has made life in northern Nigeria “incomprehensibly frightful.”

“Turns out your laptop—or camera or gaming system or gold necklace—may have a smidgen of Congo’s pain somewhere in it.”

On the slaughter of songbirds migrating across the Mediterranean.

On the dangerous glut of visitors looking to conquer Mt. Everest, where there is sometimes a two-hour wait to climb the Hillary Step.

An Aboriginal community’s attempt to maintain a 50,000-year-old way of life.

The story of Lilly Grossman’s genome.

In the wake of revolution, Libyans envision their future.

Afghanistan’s Kyrgyz nomads survive in one of Earth’s most remote places, a pocket of land 14,000 feet high where the currency is sheep, the dream is a road, and many will go an entire lifetime without ever seeing a tree.

In 1912, 300 miles deep on a trek into the uncharted Antarctic wilderness, Douglas Mawson lost most of his crew and supplies. The story of how he got back.

How the compulsion to explore is coded in the human genome.

The story of one Tibetan’s protest.

Life and death in an underground economy.

A profile of Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountain climber of all time.

We know we need it, but we don’t know why.

On Yemen’s uncertain future.

How the Oglala Lakota healed from a massacre.

On Astana, the grandiose new capital that Kazakhstan built on the site of a remote Tsarist fort, and its striving young inhabitants.

The search for what makes identical twins different.

On the autopsy of a 5,000-year-old murder victim.

On the battles, both between humans and animals, in Africa’s overpopulated Albertine Rift.

On the minds of teenagers.

On the future of Myanmar.

What overcrowded and swelling Bangladesh can tell us about how the planet’s population, more than 1/3 of which live within 62 miles of a shoreline, will react to rising sea levels.

Stuck between the Taliban and the U.S. Military, Afghanistan’s farmers risk their lives both when they grow, and when they refuse to grow, fields of poppies.

The search for the genetic distinction that allows certain animals, humans included, to be domesticated.