The world’s fastest growing economy isn’t China; it’s the “unheralded alternative economic universe of System D” aka the $10 trillion global black market.

The untold story behind the mysterious disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the world’s biggest movie star.

The untold story of Alek Minassian, a year after the deadliest mass murder in Toronto history

Eira Thomas’s company has used radical new methods to find some of the biggest uncut gems in history.

Diné activist Nicole Horseherder’s long quest for equity from the rise and fall of the coal economy.

As landlords and tenants go broke across the U.S., the next crisis point of the pandemic approaches.

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water, and people.

On the experimental favela police force UPP (aka “The Big Skull”) and their efforts to clean Rio’s largest slum in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.

A profile of David Yerushalmi, the little-known Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn leading the campaign casting Islamic law as the greatest threat to American freedom since the cold war.

Twenty-five years ago, the tragedy at the World of Primates building broke the city’s heart and raised a loaded question: What, exactly, do we owe the animals in our care?

Over the last several weeks, dozens of lawmakers, strategists and advocates described the closed-door meetings and tactical decisions that led to approval of same-sex marriage in New York, about two years after it was rejected by the Legislature. This account is based on those interviews, most of which were granted on the condition of anonymity to describe conversations that were intended to be confidential.

A look at the Mexican drug wars from the point of view of a narco’s mistress in Juárez.

On the history of Earth Day and the failure of the modern environmental movement.

Our entire way of life depends upon the “cold chain,” the network of artificially refrigerated spaces that have reshaped the modern world.

Learning of a plot against the life of the newly elected Lincoln, Alan Pinkerton decamps to Baltimore and infiltrates the conspiracy.

On the overstated effect of the Santa Ana winds on human behavior and the understated impact of climate change on LA’s seasons.

On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.

For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.

The author of The Hot Zone on how geneticists can help contain the current outbreak.

The U.S. Department of Justice investigates the Blackwater founder’s new firm.

A triple homicide, the alleged involvement of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, and those caught up in the FBI’s ongoing investigation.

The death of the journalist who exposed dark secrets about Islamic extremism in Pakistan’s military.

The Runaways, their manager Kim Fowley, and the rape of the band’s bassist, long kept a secret.

How an alcoholic doctor simultaneously saved his own life and made what could be the medical breakthrough of the century.