Brazilian businessman Zero Freitas has amassed the world’s largest collection of records, the majority of which have never been digitized.

In the throes of an epidemic, researchers investigate how to inoculate against the disease.

Colossal corruption. Political chaos. The worst recession in its history. How a once-booming nation fell.

How PCC, once an inmate soccer team and now Brazil’s most notorious prison gang, coordinated seven days of riots throughout São Paulo using mobile phones.

How three generations of a Brazilian family evangelized for and fought over the sport of Gracie jiu-jitsu as it moved from the Amazon to Hollywood to the UFC.

How an Italian businessman facing fraud charges and a Brazilian politician turned a billion dollar project to build the high speed Rio-São Paulo rail line into a farce.

On the kids who are spiritual leaders before the age of ten.

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

In the late 1960s, a German named Günther Hauck disappeared in Brazil. When he emerged, he was calling himself Tatunca Nara and claimed to be the chief of the Ugha Mongulala, an previously unknown Indian tribe. Since then he has lived in the Amazon, his legend growing. Jacques Cousteau hired him as a guide. An Indiana Jones movie was based on his stories. And three people who made pilgrimages to see him never came home.

Behind the doors of Centaurus, Rio’s most infamous brothel.

“Someone has sliced open soccer’s hourglass, and the sand has come pouring out on to the streets.”

The battle for Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Cristo Redentor statue.

A visit to Glenn Greenwald’s house in Rio.

Oil and iron-ore baron Eike Batista’s very bad year.

The impact of the oil and gas booms taking place all over the world, and our future on fossil fuels.

On the experimental favela police force UPP (aka “The Big Skull”) and their efforts to clean Rio’s largest slum in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.

“Calça de veludo ou bunda de fora.” Why Neymar, one of the world’s best talents hasn’t taken the money and run.

As the head of the CBF, Ricardo Teixera rules Brazilian futebol from the top down, controlling everything from the value of championships to broadcast rights. He needs the pull off a flawless 2014 World Cup in order to set the stage for being elected FIFA’s president, but there’s one hitch; the trail of bribes and scandals he has left in his wake.

Whenever you want him to go on the record, Teixeira shushes you and raises a finger to his lips.  He addresses men and women alike as “meu amor,” with an exaggerated Rio accent. “Meu amor, it’s all been said about me – that I smuggled goods in the Brazilian national team’s airplane, that there’s been dirty dealing in the World Cup, all those investigations into Nike and the CBF."

Translated from the original Portugese.

A young mother transplants her family to Bahia.

A 12,000-word profile of recently departed Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva, the “most successful politician of his time.”

How the relationship between favela-based drug gangs and elite police units tasked with fighting them came to define Rio de Janeiro.