How a Mexican drug cartel makes its billions.

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone work.

How a loathsome band makes gobs of money.

Reporting undercover from inside the online-shipping industry.

Frank Firetti, a 54-year-old pool salesman in Virginia, and his fading American dream.

The decades-long saga of Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife.

Part 1 • Part 2

As a 15-year runaway hitchhiker, the writer was nearly killed by a trucker. 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.

The murderous tale of Washington D.C. fabulist Albrecht Muth and his late wife Viola Drath.

Trevell Coleman wasn’t sure whether he’d killed a man. But after 17 years, he needed to find out.

A medical device company experiments on humans.

A writer considers America as he dies.

On waiting tables.

A personal history of “America’s most misunderstood religion.”

Guns, race, and childhood in Mississippi.

On the shifting nature of time.

How the biggest club in Vegas does business.

A profile of Scooter Braun, the man who made Justin Bieber.

A cautionary tale.

How the museum-quality 55,000 film collection that an East Village video store gave away ended up in a small, possibly mob-run village in Sicily.

A writer and his pills.

An interview with Maurice Sendak.

An interview with Pavement’s Bob Nastanovich.

An interview with a john.

An interview with Kate Boo.

An interview with Spike Lee.

A profile of the Mexican newsweekly, a lone voice in reporting on the narcos.

The story behind the story that ended Dan Rather’s career.

On the Daily Mail’s dominance of England.

A profile of Rebekah Brooks, who started as a secretary at News of the World and became CEO of News International by 41, developing an incredibly close relationship with Rupert Murdoch along the way.

The history of Pitchfork and its prescient take on the relationship between culture and consumption.

The false promise and double standard of integration in the Obama era.

The insanity of U.S. gun law.

Lessons learned about Washington from investigating how the “grand bargain” fell apart.

Hanging out with Barack Obama.

How a high-speed rail disaster exposed China’s corruption.

Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos.

Vegetables are "blue" in Japanese and other observations on the uneasy relationship between color and language.

Part 1 • Part 2

On being the parent of a micro preemie.

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3

Ashlyn Blocker, 13, has a “congenital insensitivity to pain.”

A profile of Taylor Wilson, who achieved nuclear fusion at age 14.

“If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you’re right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you’re also right.”

Eight women remember their first time.

Sex and status disclosure in the age of Grindr and undetectable HIV-levels.

Iran’s sex-obsessed old guard reacts to a state where “the majority of the population is young.… Young people by nature are horny. Because they are horny, they like to watch satellite channels where there are films or programs they can jerk off to.… We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off situation.”

Sex in the Olympic Village.

On the mysterious disappearance of a beloved coding legend (and his code) with stops along the way for a short history of programming languages, an ethnography of code-based communities, and an inquiry into what it means to “die young without artifact.”

An exposé of Internet Marketers.

The story of a bizarre—and bizarrely effective—smear campaign.

In a dark echo of Rear Window, a wheelchair-bound hacker seizes control of hundreds of webcams, most of them aimed at young women’s beds.

Why the future feels frozen in time, as framed by Marshall McLuhan (“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”) and William Gibson (“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”)

The emotional toll on drone pilots.

A clandestine meeting between Western journalists and Hezbollah fighters in a Beirut strip mall.

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

Inside the attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

“If you think cam girls—those flirty naked characters that plague porn site pop-up ads—are raking in easy money, you’re right. If you think cam girls are bleakly stripping online out of desperation, you’re also right.”

How a loathsome band makes gobs of money.

Scientology’s stronghold on Tom Cruise’s dating life.

A master troll on trial in New Jersey.

As a 15-year runaway hitchhiker, the writer was nearly killed by a trucker. 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.

Sex in the Olympic Village.

Hanging out with Barack Obama.

The strangest and most volatile American drug craze since crack.

How child molesters get away with it.

The decades-long saga of Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife.

The rise and fall of the “most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history.”

The story of William Morgan: American, wanderer, Cuban revolutionary.

In 1810, a freed slave named Tom Molineaux fought one of the most important bouts in boxing history.

The legacy of a secret Cold War program that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers.

The evolution of currency as “a complete abstraction.”

After the storms, a man tries to find his lost cat.

A doctor and a rabbi try to find ways to understand the world, and God, and one another.

A woman’s communications and interactions with a potential criminal.

A dirty story about delicate hands.

A story about love letters and failed connections.

There were so many ways the two planes could have avoided the collision. The odds were so slim. But high above the Amazon in 2006, a combination of technology and human fallibility brought them together.

Life as an air-traffic controller at LaGuardia.

The transcript of a disaster.

The story of Southwest Airlines.

On the attempted hijacking of a FedEx flight by a FedEx employee.

On the dream of a transportation system reliant as much on small, safe commuter planes as cars.

The author, two years old when Southern Flight 242 crashed in his backyard, reports on the aftermath, both for his family and for the passengers.