No one understands our new era of reality-TV populism better than the man who turned “The Real Housewives” into an empire.

The president of the Philippines’ kill list is reputed to have over million names of supposed drug pushers and addicts, including many mayors and politicians. There is no reliable way to get off the list other than dying in a hail of bullets from assassins on motorbikes.

A palliative-care doctor and triple amputee has built a new kind of hospice in San Francisco.

She went to jail 35 years ago after driving the getaway car in an infamous robbery and defiantly refusing to admit the act was wrong. Her sentence was 75 years. But something changed in prison — Judy Clark went from radical to model inmate. This week her sentence was commuted.

How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

On astrophysicist Sara Seager and her obsession with discovering distant worlds.

When you quite literally have no health insurance options.

When a wealthy businessman set out to divorce his wife, their fortune vanished. The quest to find it would reveal the depths of an offshore financial system bigger than the U.S. economy.

Inside the real lives of people who came early to intentionally provoking, confusing, and generally screwing with strangers online.

With the Kurdish pesh merga on the road to Mosul.

Two years after she sued producer Dr. Luke, saying he had drugged, raped, and emotionally abused her, Kesha is still bound to her original recording contract. She owes $100,000 (conservatively) per month on legal bills and can’t release any new music.

On America’s deep and persistent fear of the black penis.

When Larycia Hawkins, the first black woman to receive tenure at Wheaton College, made a symbolic gesture of support for Muslims, the evangelical college became divided over what intellectual freedom on its campus really meant.

Inside the final weeks of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Activists hoped President Obama would fight for stronger regulation. Eight years later, they’re still waiting.

When the most famous amnesiac in history died, the battle for custody of his brain began.

Baltimore’s state’s attorney gambled that prosecuting six officers for the death of Freddie Gray would help heal her city. She lost much more than just the case.

Inside the thriving subculture of Japanese men who eschew sex and romance with real live people in favor of real relationships with 2-D characters printed on body pillows.

Firefighter Kevin Shea, one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, was “the survivor who couldn’t remember what no one else could forget.”

Balancing the creation of a house with living in it as a home.

Why Berhanu Nega traded a tenured position in Pennsylvania for the chance to move to a rustic Eritrean bungalow and lead a revolutionary force against an oppressive regime.

Oliver Stone wanted a hit—and the chance to put America’s most iconic dissident onscreen. The subject wanted veto power. The Russian lawyer wanted someone to option the novel he’d written. The American lawyer just wanted the whole insane project to go away. Somehow a film got made.

Only 16 counties regularly impose death sentences, and they have three things in common: overaggressive prosecutors, defense lawyers who aren’t up to the task and cultural legacies of racial bias. Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit is among them.

A full-issue length, 42,000-word history of the dissolution of the Middle East, from the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago until present.

Five years after the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter.