Being off the grid suits Kurt Vile just fine. Sitting on the wraparound porch in jeans and a green T-shirt he got at the Ramones Museum in Berlin, unruly curls falling well below his shoulders, the 38-year-old Philadelphia singer-guitarist squirts several drops of a tincture labeled “Calm Mind” into a plastic water bottle and gives it a thorough swish. “Ayurvedic herbs,” he explains after gulping down his concoction. “It’s like nature’s Xanax.” He doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

Mexico’s drug cartels are moving into the gasoline industry—infiltrating the national oil company, selling stolen fuel on the black market and engaging in open war with the military.

Matthew Weigman was blind, overweight, 14, and alone. He could also do anything he wanted with a phone. Sometimes that meant calling Lindsay Lohan. Other times it meant sending a SWAT team to an enemy’s door.

A profile of John McCain during the 2000 presidential race.

Inside Arnold’s manic, occasionally dishonest quest to find tapes of Trump using slurs on the set of The Apprentice.

Working with nothing but an Internet connection, a couple of cellphones and a steady supply of weed, the two friends — one with a few college credits, the other a high school dropout — had beaten out Fortune 500 giants like General Dynamics to score the huge arms contract.

When a U.S. citizen heard he was on his own country’s drone target list, he wasn’t sure he believed it. After five near-misses, he does – and is suing the United States to contest his own execution.

Rojava becomes the Spanish Civil War of modern times for a ragtag group of leftists revolutionaries.

How Jerry Lee Lewis got away with murdering 25-year-old Shawn Michelle Stevens, his fifth wife.

How a Hollywood icon found himself at a dead end.

How a senseless double murder in Florida exposed the rise of an organized fascist youth movement in the United States.

An interview with Cobain a few months after the release of In Utero.

A profile of Spears at her nadir.

A jailhouse interview.

How extreme weather, which displaced more than a million people last year, could reshape America.

Developed by early computer engineers in their spare time, improved in University comp-sci labs, and ultimately sold in coffeeshops for ten cents per game. Inside one of the most influential games ever played.

How legends of the American music industry made millions off the work of Solomon Linda, a Zulu tribesman who wrote “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and died a pauper.

A jailhouse interview.

The rise and fall of a chubby Idaho pizza delivery boy turned weed kingpin.

An estimated 70,000 transgender youth lack secure housing. This is what life on the streets is like for six of them.

A thirty-year-old Tom Petty on the brink of Damn the Torpedoes.

A Manson-contemporary cult group rises out of a jug band, builds a fortress in the Boston ghetto, bullies control of a community newspaper, swallows a successful actor, fractures, splits for California, and attempts to describe to the reporter the enigma that is Mel Lyman.

Inside the singular world of Longmont Potion Castle.

“I learned about sex in a Laundromat. The setting wasn’t my idea. It was my mother’s who had brought me along on washday to break the news.”

Ricky Rodriguez was born in the role of the messiah. His father was David Berg, the leader of the polygamous/incestuous cult The Children of God, which published a book documenting his early life:

In 1982 a shop in Spain printed several thousand copies of a book that was then distributed to group members around the world. Bound in faux leather, illustrated with hundreds of photographs, the 762-page tome meticulously chronicled Ricky's young life and was intended as a child-rearing manual for families. Its title, The Story of Davidito, was stamped in gold. With its combination of earnest prose and unabashed child pornography, it is perhaps the most disturbing book ever published in the name of religion.

Eventually, he left the cult and found work as an electrician. But revenge called him back.