A just-barred Pakistani-American attorney attempts to save a young family’s home from foreclosure and glimpses the contradiction-rich bureaucracy that has emerged in response to the housing crisis.

When Isis rounded up Yazidi women and girls in Iraq to use as slaves, the captives drew on their collective memory of past oppressions – and a powerful will to survive.

When she died in 1952, author Margaret Wise Brown left the rights to Goodnight Moon to a nine-year-old neighbor named Albert Clarke. The book became a classic. Clarke, living entirely off the royalties, became a deadbeat.

Houston was plagued by a series of brutal armored car robberies that bewildered FBI agents for nearly two years. To finally bring down the unassuming mastermind behind it all, the agents had to stage an elaborate trap—and catch him in the act.

In his old life, Matthew Cox told stories to scam his way into millions of dollars. Now he’s trying to make it by selling tales that are true.

It was once a widely accepted way of explaining why some children struggled to read and write. But in recent years, some experts have begun to question the existence of dyslexia itself.

A Manson-contemporary cult group rises out of a jug band, builds a fortress in the Boston ghetto, bullies control of a community newspaper, swallows a successful actor, fractures, splits for California, and attempts to describe to the reporter the enigma that is Mel Lyman.

In my naive denial, I had wanted to see him as a hapless ne’er-do-well, a nonconformist with a streak of dishonesty. I liked to think of him as a latter-day Robin Hood. Now I knew that wasn’t true.

Will LaFever never felt right in the world. So he took to the Utah desert, barely making it out alive.

A profile of Kehinde Wiley, a painter who inserts the “brown faces” that have historically been relegated to the background in Western art.

A trip to a pepper-eating contest in remote India.

After two tours in Iraq, the writer returns to a volatile region of Afghanistan as an embedded journalist.

A 2011 profile of LeBron James, originally meant to run in Port, that was killed by Nike.

On the anger that led to the Watts Riots of 1965, the mistakes made during those six days in August, and how little changed afterward.

On the seminal songwriter, who died four years ago today, in his final days before succumbing to dipsomania.

A torrid phone sex affair begins with a random call in a motel and ends a year later with a face-to-face meeting.

Each year, thousands of people pay to play eighteen holes of golf at Angola, “the largest maximum-security prison in the country.”

From pinball prohibition in 1940s NYC to Dave & Buster’s, the rise and fall of the American arcade.

In search of the former boxing champ, who refuses to believe he has HIV.

The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

The author dives to the wreck of the Mohawk, where his uncle died in 1935.

The stories of the 109 black men who have played quarterback in the NFL, from Fritz Pollard to Russell Wilson.

A study of the Mississippi River, its history, and efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hold it in place.

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.

The anatomy of a 1930 epidemic that wasn’t:

Was parrot fever really something to worry about? Reading the newspaper, it was hard to say. “not contagious in man,” the Times announced. “Highly contagious,” the Washington Post said. Who knew? Nobody had ever heard of it before. It lurked in American homes. It came from afar. It was invisible. It might kill you. It made a very good story. In the late hours of January 8th, editors at the Los Angeles Times decided to put it on the front page: “two women and man in Annapolis believed to have 'parrot fever.'"