Two truckers talk on a wintry Alaskan highway.

Trials and dangers abound for an interplanetary social worker.

Cemetery field recordings reveal terrifying messages.

A young man's connection with a circle-drawing, perceptive young woman.

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Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked. It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.

How Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., an openly gay hedge fund star, came to marry Ellen Pao, a partner at a powerful Silicon Valley firm, before they “went to war with their elite worlds.”

“We still have retrograde ideas about how pregnant women should feel, and we need to revise them — not only for depressed women but for all women.”

Attracted by lax regulations, industrial agriculture has descended on a remote valley, depleting its aquifer — leaving many residents with no water at all.

It started as simple teenage rebellion but ended up tearing Syria apart, setting in motion events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world. The boys behind the graffiti would become unlikely revolutionaries and reluctant refugees. Not all of them would survive the upheaval they helped unleash.

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?

It’s 11 p.m. when Larson at last agrees to meet me in the lobby of the Hampton Inn, next door to the Gurnee Grand. He’s just come out of a marathon closed-door meeting with his fellow exiled senators. Tall, gap-toothed, and handsome, but with a squished, broad nose, Larson appears in a fitted black overcoat, a sedate suit with a Wisconsin flag lapel pin, and an athletic backpack. He looks shockingly young, younger than his thirty years, and seems to be relieved that I am even a few years younger myself. We jump in my Chevy and head for the town’s late-night diner: Denny’s. By the time we settle into a booth, Larson has dropped the routine political affectations—the measured language, the approved talking points, the inauthentic humor. We’re cracking up comparing Republicans to evildoers on South Park and shit-talking mutual acquaintances in Milwaukee. And then, just as Larson is about to take a bite of his veggie burger, I ask the freshman senator if he is scared. “What would I be scared about?” he replies.

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.

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.