How a brilliant self-made software programmer from South Africa single-handedly built an online startup that became one of the largest individual contributors to America’s burgeoning painkiller epidemic. In his world, everything was for sale. Pure methamphetamine manufactured in North Korea. Yachts built to outrun coast guards. Police protection and judges’ favor. Crates of military-grade weapons. Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias. Explosives. Kidnapping. Torture. Murder. It's a world that lurks just outside of our everyday perception, in the dark corners of the internet we never visit, the quiet ports where ships slip in by night, the back room of the clinic down the street.

A little over 30 years ago, a Northern Neck fisherman went to prison for the brutal slaying of a homecoming queen and mother of two. Now, a reexamination of the case by a hard-charging UVA lawyer has turned up troubling questions.

On September 20, 1973, 50 million Americans watched Bobby Riggs lose to Billie Jean King in a tennis match dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes.” This spring, a man named Hal Shaw came forward with a secret he’d held for 40 years: Riggs, in debt to the mafia, had lost on purpose.

For years, Mark Zuckerberg has faced criticism that Facebook is bad for democracy. A cache of leaked audio reveals the story of how much ultimately comes down to his judgment—and the forces freezing him in place.

For online advertisers, probably most of it. An investigation.

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.”

Notes on a summer spent aboard an industrial fishing boat off the Alaskan coast.

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?

On a small section of land wedged between Egypt and Sudan called Bir Tawil and the American who tried to claim it for himself.

Philanthropist and private equity mogul David Rubenstein is lauded for his patriotic donations, including half the cost of repairing the Washington Monument. He also helped save a controversial tax break billionaires love.

The American students hopped across the border for a night of partying in Matamoros. One didn’t return and was found later in a shack with 14 other corpses.

At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away. He had no plan. He had no tools. And he survived alone for 27 years.

An oral history of the day oil prices went below zero for the first time in trading history.

In the West, organized extremists are driving community health officials out of their jobs.

How an obscure Australian judge and a hard-charging lawyer put the S&P on trial for the global financial collapse.

The search for the missing Holocaust hero began in 1945. The unending quest tore his family apart.

Searching for (and easily finding) Mark Augustus Landis, the man behind the “longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known.”

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.”

But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise. Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at "fixing" a nation that, to those who are attempting it, stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a disease that hadn't been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter million people.

EEE kills almost half of its victims, and cases are on the rise.

Faced with fragility and uncertainty, gig workers around the world are connecting across borders to challenge platforms’ power and policies.

A woman is accused of lying about being raped. Years later and several states away, the story changed.