In just a few years, a Michigan woman took in millions of dollars, faking adoptions and ruining families’ lives along the way.

Tracking down 40-odd members of the British band.

It's a Tuesday morning in December, and I'm ringing people called Brown in Rotherham. "Hello," I begin again. "I'm trying to trace Jonnie Brown who used to play in the Fall. He came from Rotherham and I wondered if you might be a relative." "The Who?" asks the latest Mr Brown. "No. The Fall - the band from Salford. He played bass for three weeks in 1978." "Is this some kind of joke?"

Murder in the Juarez Valley:

A few weeks after Saul Reyes and his family fled Mexico, I drove to an immigrant shelter in downtown El Paso to see him. As the former city secretary of Guadalupe, Saul had once been in charge of recording the births and deaths of everyone in his hometown. He’d taken it upon himself now to collect every single name of those who had died or disappeared in Guadalupe since the killing began in 2008. Through media reports and meetings with the many valley exiles now living in Texas, Saul had compiled a list of the town’s dead and disappeared. Showing me the book, he turned page after page of names. So far he had counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and eight unknown bodies dumped in his small town of 3,000 people. “There are a lot more, but these are the ones I’ve been able to collect,” he said. In his careful, spidery script, he had written on one page the names of his six family members.

Activities include: getting his own stem cells injected into his body every six months, taking 100 supplements a day, following a strict diet, bathing in infrared light, hanging out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wearing yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane.

Georgia and Patterson Inman, 15-year-old twins, are the only living heirs to the $1 billion Duke tobacco fortune. They are also emotional wrecks, tortured by a hellacious childhood in which they were raised by drug addicts and left to fend for themselves in mansions across the country.

For at least 130 years, cabbies in London have been taking what many believe is the hardest test in the world: through a series of oral exams that takes four years to complete, they must prove that know every one of the city’s 25,000 streets, every business and every landmark.

“I was in the visiting clubhouse waiting to interview one of the Oakland A’s this year when one of the players called, ‘Here, pussy’—as though he were calling a cat. But of course, he hadn’t lost Fluffy; he’d found a woman in his locker room.”

Noorullah Aminya was once a valuable ally to the American military. Then, with the Taliban going after his family, he attempted to defect and spent three years in federal detention. To be granted asylum, he needed to convince a judge that the Taliban rule Afghanistan in full. Which would mean America has lost the war.

Shamir is 15, bored and broke and balancing right on the edge.

Professional wrestling as the epitome of American capitalism.

A grandmother tells her story.

When Manny Ramirez played half a season for the E-DA Rhinos.

How the Oglala Lakota healed from a massacre.

Two brothers dreamed of baseball stardom. One would end up killing the other.

On hypochondria.

A profile of the first and only transgender MMA fighter.

An oral history of the soap opera.

On the master palindromist, Barry Duncan.

On the U.S. immigration prison-industrial complex.

Visiting with the Christian fighters defending Iraq’s Nineveh Plains.

Ricky Williams today.

On the wives of whalers and their dildos.

A former member of SEAL Team 6 sheds her disguise.

The life and death of a gorilla named Julia.