The Estonia was carrying 989 passengers when it sank in 30-foot seas on its way across the Baltic in September 1994. More than 850 lost their lives. The ones who survived acted quickly and remained calm.

It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.

A profile of Edna Buchanan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Miami Herald during its heyday.

In late 1960s London, famed psychoanalyst R.D. Laing created a radical asylum—one with no doctors, no locks, and no limits.

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

Riots in Athens, the shadowy Vatopaidi monastery, and a quarter million dollars in debt for every citizen. Welcome to Greece.

Three teenage boys decide to set sail after a night of drinking. They go missing for 51 days.

A profile of Tiger Woods at 21.

A journalist goes undercover in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum.

You learn to believe in your child’s existence. What happens when she’s killed by a piece of your daily environment?

A trip to a lobster festival leads to an examination of the culinary and ethical dimensions of cooking a live, possibly sentient, creature.

At age 17, Bonnie Richardson won the Texas state track team championship all by herself. Then she did it again.

How Rupert Murdoch’s empire of influence remade the world.

A profile of a previously unknown rookie pitcher for the Mets who dropped out of Harvard, made a spiritual quest to Tibet, and somewhere along the line figured out how to throw a baseball much, much faster than anyone else on Earth.

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.

Using several email addresses and a lot of exclamation points, teenager Jonathan Lebed worked finance message boards in the morning before school and made almost a million bucks. Then he made the head of the S.E.C. look like a fool.

It was just a kayaking trip. Then it upended their lives.

Where words fail, there is music.

When she was a 15-year-old runaway, the writer was nearly killed by a truck driver. Twenty-seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

During the Great Floods of 2011, the Mississippi unleashed deadly currents and a flow rate that could fill the Superdome in less than a minute. Defying government orders, the author and two friends canoed 300 miles from Memphis to Vicksburg. This is their story.

People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.

On JFK and the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

On medical acting and real pain.

A trip to the Iditarod.

Can a good mother abandon her child?