A work trip to Turkmenistan.

On driving (and walking) in the Middle East – from Syria to Lebanon, across Saudi Arabia to Dammam, in a taxi through war-torn Beirut.

For decades, dozens of men with intellectual disabilities lived in an old schoolhouse and did gruesome work in a turkey plant for subminimum wage. No one noticed.

“Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements.”

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

Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.

On the rise of telemedicine in rural America, where the number of ER patients has surged by 60 percent in the past decade as the number of doctors and hospitals has declined by up to 15 percent.

In just a few years, a Michigan woman took in millions of dollars, faking adoptions and ruining families’ lives along the way.

Possible clues about Lincoln’s murder in the unlikeliest place.

The backstory of “The Duke in His Domain,” Truman Capote’s 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando.

In 1945, a fire tore through the home of George and Jennie Sodder. Four children escaped; five vanished.

A lesson in ethics.

A generation that has seen inestimable violence comes of age in Juarez.

A 27-year old reporter is kidnapped in Somalia and held hostage for over a year.

What the CIA really knew about Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who disappeared in 2007.

Embedded with a U.S. bomb squad in Baghdad.

The story that inspired The Hurt Locker.

On Norman Bel Geddes, pioneer of miniatures and maker of the “most iconic World’s Fair exhibit of all time.”

Testimonies about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, reported by the 2015 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

While accused killer Robert Durst was in Galveston, he made a few friends besides Morris Black.

There are two roles to play in the new world of on-demand everything: royalty or servant.

A mayday call in the critical moments after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform.

The shooting death of the last wild Passenger Pigeon, atomic energy, mastodon watering holes, and other footnotes in Ohio history.

Alaska brims with stories of people who vanish and are given up for dead. Once in a while, the dead return.

Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial Day weekend in Chicago.

A Marxist archaeologist uncovers traces of fugitive slave settlements deep in the Great Dismal Swamp.