“I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices. But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head…‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”

Shot and killed just shy of his 18th birthday, Deonte Hoard was one of 489 homicide victims in Chicago last year. How this happened—and how it keeps happening—is both one person’s story and the story of how a community has been forced to adjust to murder as an everyday fact of life.

Trump came out and took a lunch break, still being mobbed by cameras on the way in and out. On his way back in, I asked him how he would feel about getting picked for a jury. He paused, weighing whether to grace me with a precious sound bite. He turned to me and said, “If it happens, it happens.”

A private contractor tossed U.S. military waste in Iraq and Afghanistan into giant pits and burned it. Now soldiers forced to breathe the toxic fumes are sick or dying—and the government is using faulty science to evade responsibility.

“Last August, I found myself wrung out and miserable over the state of the United States—the vitriol of the presidential election, the deep chasms of reality where we all seemed to find ourselves. I wanted to get the hell away, but not just away. I wanted out. I wanted nothing that resembled where I was coming from. I wanted everything new.”

“From this day forward, Ken doesn’t always have to look like the most basic frat bro ever to get a B- in econ. He can be complicated, mysterious—maybe even vegan. No more Mr. Nice Ken. (Actually, he’ll still be very, very nice.)”

Satoshi Nakamoto was the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Facing bankruptcy and jail, Craig Wright fled Australia knowing that he would soon be outed as Satoshi by multiple publications. Backed by a business group that hoped to sell his patents, Wright was due to show the proof that he possessed the original keys for Bitcoin, but did he?

Earlier this month, while China's leaders were staging a grandiose celebration of their revolution's 40th birthday, thousands of somber Hong Kong residents gathered for a dreary commemoration of their own. Far from the fireworks display in Beijing, Hong Kongers huddled in a rainstorm near the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, singing patriotic songs and listening to mournful poems dedicated to those who died in Tiananmen Square.

When people ask what I like so much about being from the Midwest, I get to tell them: I know the architecture of the wind. I know the violence it blows in and out. I like to keep my survival as simple as I can.

Did Thomas Pynchon write a series of letters to Northern California newspapers under the pseudonym “Wanda Tinasky”?

Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.

What led to the death of a 5-year-old boy, “the Everychild in the state system.”

The dispute over what may be the biggest sunken treasure ever found – and who gets to keep it.

A conversation with one of Russia’s “little green men”: a 24-year-old recruited to fight in Eastern Ukraine.

A father who brought his daughter to a ballgame and the fallout from a foul ball.

Y.A. Tittle, an 87-year-old Hall of Fame quarterback with dementia, travels to his hometown for the last time.

Kim Goodsell had a pair of rare diseases. Doctors didn’t have the time to look for a link. So she taught herself genetics and found it herself.

A small New Jersey town is world-famous among Orthodox Jews as a place to come ask for handouts.

Monaco’s richest woman was shot in ambush outside a hospital. Her heirs stand to inherit over a billion dollars each.

When jobs vanish, Southern men find new ways to contribute.

In the 1970s, Chile was on the verge of developing sophisticated technology to monitor its economy. Then America intervened.

Why parties, love, kids, conversation and more are so miserable (at least to Phillip Lopate).

Thousands of new warehouse jobs were supposed to help lift a struggling British economy. Instead, employees started equating the work with “being in a slave camp.”

Investigating a former NFL star’s new business: renting professional athletes to their biggest fans.