Inside a plot to influence American elections, starting with one small-town race.

“It’s Tuesday, it’s February, it’s my first day back at work after a week on vacation. I notice the candle in the foyer just as the whoosh of the door blows it out. They never did that for my birthday, I think as I walk past reception.”

The anatomy of a bungled, massively expensive undercover sting conducted by the Seattle Police Department.

The long arm of the DEA reaches into Liberia to bust a cocaine trafficker.

The taming of the political reporter.

A week in the life of a family weathering the coronavirus.

On the curious life of Archibald Butt, confidant to President Taft and tragic victim of the sinking Titanic.

As much as the narrative of Butt’s heroism meant to the family, to the White House, to the military, it seems all too cinematic. The reality is that the experience was probably a great annoyance to him, right up until the moment it became a nightmare.

Nearing the end of his career, a Canadian tycoon named Michael DeGroote went for one last deal, investing $100 million to build a Las Vegas in the Dominican Republic. His partners? Two brothers with a criminal past, a con man and an old friend with close ties to the mob.

How mitigation specialists are changing the application of the death penalty:

In Texas, the most prominent mitigation strategist is a lawyer named Danalynn Recer, the executive director of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center. Based in Houston, GRACE has represented defendants in death-penalty cases since 2002. “The idea was to improve the way capital trials were done in Texas, to start an office that would bring the best practices from other places and put them to work here,” Recer said recently. “This is not some unknowable thing. This is not curing cancer. We know how to do this. It is possible to persuade a jury to value someone’s life.”

A tech neophyte looks for answers in Silicon Valley, “the last place in America where people are this optimistic.”

A few months after working at Ground Zero, Kurt Sonnenfeld became a suspect in the mysterious and high-profile death of his wife. He got off, barely, and started a new life in South America. But when the U.S. tried to bring him back to face charges, Sonnenfeld went to the local media. The Feds didn’t want him for murder, he said. They wanted to put him away because of what he knew about 9/11.

The next frontier of search is… everything. Voice recognition, image recognition, and why Google’s data set is one of the most valuable scientific tools of our age.

For the members of UCLA’s undocumented immigrant club, going to school means fighting for an education most students take for granted.

A profile of Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and the author of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.

A profile of Moktar Belmoktar, Al-Qaida’s “most difficult employee,” who was responsible for a major attack on an Algerian BP plant and, according to U.S. and Libyan forces, was killed in an air strike on Sunday.

“Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier’s son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.”

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

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?

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

The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

Traveling the highway that could make Brazil an economic powerhouse — at the expense of the Amazon.

How the government enabled the one percent to capitalize on the housing crisis.