An engineering team races to create a next-generation computer.

The first installment of The Soul of a New Machine.

At a playground in North Wales, kids are mostly left alone to experiment with fire, jump from great heights and play in a creek. It’s designed to teach the value of taking risks, a lesson many American children have stopped learning.

On the campaign trail with Florida’s malleable ex-governor.

“Too much is being asked of the Delta.”

A former student and high school coach travel to California to kidnap the coach’s daughter, an adult film actress.

A former student and high school coach travel to California to kidnap the coach's daughter, an adult film actress.

"I would watch her green eyes, the smile that always closed them. I remember her face lit by a Bunsen burner's quivering flame, laughter bursting from her like confetti. Once, I saw her slap Junior Wendell's hand away from her skirt, and I felt the confinement of a teenage girl. The way her mind was full of longings—a knot of emotions constantly rising to the surface, washing over her, carrying her through a harrowed suburban field, past the shopping mall and long acres of bluestem grass, into the back seats of cars, truckbeds."

On goalies, and in particular, really good Finnish ones.

An investigation into America’s Greek system.

Unpacking the 76,897 micro-genres that make up the cinematic DNA.

Arriving in China at 23, Sidney Rittenberg spent 35 years as a “friend, confidante, translator, and journalist” for the Communist Party’s top leaders. In this interview, he recalls both his friendship with Chairman Mao and the 16 years he spent in solitary confinement.

How a 20-something made millions as an e-commerce hustler.

“I’ve tried therapy, drugs, and booze. Here’s what helps.”

“This is a story about how the future gets weird.”

On Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s lust for blood-sport.

Why one man made it his mission to kill 60 known sex offenders.

Lyndon Baines Johnson in retirement.

On using data to hire and fire.

How our memories become contaminated by inaccuracies.

A profile of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who has spent the last 30 years trying to replicate the human mind.

How both the drugs and the music have evolved together.

A briefing on drone warfare.

A rodeo rider squares off with a racist immigration official.

"He saw deputies in their serious hats coming through the restaurant from the kitchen, four white guys who looked like they meant business, serious, minds made up, and Nachee thought of a grandfather now from the other time, more than a hundred years ago, Nachitay, sitting in Mi Nidito with Victor’s grandfather from the same time, Victorio. Sometimes Nachee talked to Victor about those guys living the way they chose to. You hungry? Run off a mule, cut steaks and cook them over a fire. Before General Crook came along on his mule, the one Nachee’s grandfather from that other time was dying to eat. Bring them all here to sit with their rifles, Victorio, Cochise, Geronimo … those guys doing whatever they wanted. They never carried ID but every horse soldier in the Arizona Territory knew who they were."

How a serial killer and his teenage accomplice used listings for “the job of a lifetime” to lure their victims, all down-and-out single men, to the backwoods of Ohio.

Unpacking a false confession 20 years later.