From the 1940s through the early 70s, incoming freshman at Harvard, Yale, Vassar, Wellesley, and several other top schools were photographed nude in the name of science–bogus science, as it turned out. Most of the photos were destroyed, but not all.

A week before 9/11, a five-day standoff at a 34-acre campground in rural Michigan that been the site of marijuana festivals ended with the killing of the couple that owned it, Tom Crosslin, 46, and Rolland “Rollie” Rohm, 28.

After the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, Muslim journalists covering Hindu extremism noticed a change. The masks came off; the facade of courtesy, once flimsy, crumbled altogether.

He pauses and glances around him. Just about everyone in the place is aware of him now. When he continues, the voice is still under control, but the eyes have become lasers. “I know that some of the press is out to get me. It’s ’cause I’m more intelligent than they are, I handle myself well, I’m wealthy and I’m black—and there ain’t nothin’ they can do about it.” He flashes his joyless smile

So you’re surrounded by idiots. Guess who the real jerk is.

The island of Coiba off the coast of Panama is both a nature preserve and an open-air prison.

At 9:14pm on November 22, 1987, sportscaster Dan Roan was doing the Bears highlights on Chicago’s WGN-TV when the station’s signal was hijacked. Someone wearning a rubber Max Headroom mask appeared, silently, on TV screens around the city. A few hours later, Headroom popped up again on another channel, this time for longer and with audio. Despite FBI and FCC investigations, the case remains unsolved.

The invention of offshore banking.

Survivors of the 2011 Japanese tsunami in a small town on the north-east coast are haunted by a split second decision at a local school.

An American woman's travels and memories of her Russian husband.

Bryan Goldberg’s site for women was widely mocked when it launched a year ago. Today it has 15 million readers per month and some of its harshest early critics are on the payroll.

From “Idiocracy” to “Silicon Valley,” the writer and director has established himself as America’s foremost chronicler of its own self-destructive tendencies.

At 90 years old, Lawrence Hill’s mother was ready to end it all on her own terms, but Canada’s assisted-dying law was too strict to allow that.

A profile of the PR agent who blurs truth for clients like Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly. “If it were a relationship, we’d call it gaslighting, but it’s a profession, so we call it PR.”

Brian Chavez was supposed to be the one who made it out of Odessa. It didn’t turn out that way.

The man who brought together heat, yoga, monthly fees to use his methods, and raw sexuality, on allegations that he has slept with scores of his followers: “Only when they give me no choice! If they say to me, ‘Boss, you must fuck me or I will kill myself,’ then I do it! Think if I don’t! The karma!”

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.

“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.”

Is creativity in our genes? A self-made scholar’s search for the answer.

When Jeb Bush married his wife, it was the bravest thing he’d ever done. Her role in his life is still a mystery.

Convicted and facing jail time plus a crippling fine in Sweden, the founders of the torrent site The Pirate’s Bay have scattered across the world towards new lives: fatherhood in Laos, a junkie’s life in Phnom Penh, and start-up work in Berlin.

On a failed attack in Spokane and the fragments of homegrown terrorism in the United States.

Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.