How the tapping of Angola’s natural resources has kept the country a killing field, and made it one of the world’s most glaringly inefficient kleptocracies.

An oral history of the most important deal in sports TV history, when Rupert Murdoch and Fox stole the NFL and John Madden out from under the Big Three networks and launched a television empire.

David Simon and Richard Price, two of the greatest crime storytellers of our time, talk about their craft.

The CEO of the US’s biggest bank doesn’t have much charisma or a track record, but he’s “doing as well as any little Dutch boy can—sticking his fingers in the dike.”

An investigative reporter goes undercover at a dealership to learn the tricks of the trade, of which there are many.

The bureaucratic hell of enforcing legislation in Washington.

Renting in one of the most expensive American cities.

The enduring system of organized crime in Naples.

He decided to bury a box of treasure in the desert. Why?

Inside the world of underground sex trafficking in Houston.

First-person accounts from the 2004 siege of a Russian school in Beslan by Chechen terrorists.

The death of one Nevada man in a chaotic, unregulated, and expensive industry.

"Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section."

They believe that strangers on the street watch them, follow them in vans, whisper as they pass. Their family urge them to seek help. Then they find people online who have experienced the same thing they have.

On Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

A 2003 essay that foreshadows the emergence of the Islamic State a decade later – an insurgency incited by American policy in Iraq during the early days of the war.

In 1942, a volley of torpedoes sent the U.S.S. Wasp to the bottom of the Pacific. Earlier this year, a team of wreck hunters set out to find it.

An interview with Greil Marcus on the songs of Van Morrison and why people are afraid of imagined things.

Policing the world of experimental research in the age of TED talks and Freakonomics.

The fall of PCCare247, an Indian company in the business of selling fixes to problems that didn’t exist.

Tony Kushner and the burdens of being one of the last public intellectuals in American theater.

How coach Gregg Popovich’s love of fine wine led to a 20-year run of success in the NBA.

In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him—for 438 days.

“With the rise of factory farming, milk is now a most unnatural operation.”