John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed.

A decade-long Internet hoax unravels.

In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.

Chris Barry was born into Washington D.C. royalty. He died alone, essentially homeless, just a year after losing a race for his father’s former seat.

His father was a notorious figure in Providence organized crime. Boxing offered a different path for Jarrod Tillinghast—but it didn’t stop him from slipping into his old ways and robbing drug dealers with his neighborhood friends.

Most tycoons give big to one or two universities as their children approach college age. David Shaw gave to seven.

The early days of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

An exposé of the New York Police Department’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.

Fighting to the finish in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan.

A profile of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister.

How Juarez became the murder capital of the world.

The New York Times reveals the deception of 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair.

The story behind the fall of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad.

On the future of the liberal Israeli newspaper Haartez.

A faked marriage between undercover agents leads to the arrest of a dozen drug dealers.

The story of the landmark musical’s improbable success.

A physiological theory of mental illness.

A week in the world of the Miss America Pageant.

The Pope’s vision for addressing climate change.

The family accused of funding the Pakistani Taliban.

The story of the family who couldn’t stop adopting.

Pakistani fishing communities struggle inside the nets of bonded labor.

Can a cowboy become the greatest polo player of all time?

“As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late.”

A profile of the Hell’s Angels following “front-page reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula.”

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”