CeCe McDonald, a homeless trans teen in Minneapolis, was charged with murder for defending herself. Then she became a folk hero.

Spun-off from Time Warner and saddled with $1.3 billion in debt as a parting gift, the once-mighty Time Inc needs to reinvent itself. Fast.

In 1981, Mauritania became the last country on Earth to abolish slavery. The law had little effect; at least 140,000 people are still enslaved today. Their best hope for freedom is an abolitoinist named Biram Dah Abeid.

“You are reading this because you have no idea what NASA is doing. And NASA, tongue-tied by jargon, can’t figure out how to tell you. But the agency is engaged in work that can be more enduring and far-reaching than anything else this country is paying for.”

On what you do and don’t learn in medical school.

Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, who left Pro-Choice activism for born-again Christianity and a strange life of financial opportunism, died this week.

The story of Thor Holm Hansen—”Norwegian country singer, a former Outlaws motorcycle chieftain, and an ‘ambassador at large’ to a rebel Haitian government”—who claims to be back in Florida to locate his missing daughter.

Chasing the embers of hedonism in Morocco and Tunisia, as Salafi mobs and new regimes wash over the brothels, beaches, and nightclubs of what used to be the Arab world’s most liberal cities.

“Five years, four judges, six lawyers, $400,000 in attorney and expert fees and costs, a child yanked back and forth, [and] petty arguing.” Chronicling the slow end of one American marriage.

On the writers, poets and beats in a reclusive California town, where residents repeatedly tear down highway signs indicating its location.

The author participates in the Society for Creative Anachronism’s “Crown Lyst, the twice-yearly event when knights will battle with ancient weapons and the victor will be named the new king.”

Billy Dillon was about to sign a contract with the Detroit Tigers. Instead he was convicted–wrongly–of first-degree murder and spent the next 27 years in prison.

“Joe’s hand began to tingle, and he called the group together. The toxins would leave his system in 48 hours, he said. He’d be conscious the whole time.”

“For the first few days after the surgery, it was difficult to separate out my newly implanted sense from the bits of pain and sensation created by the trauma of having the magnet jammed in my finger.”

It started as a bluebird New Year’s Day in Mount Rainier National Park. But when a gunman murdered a ranger and then fled back into the park’s frozen backcountry, every climber, skier, and camper became a suspect—and a potential victim.

“His seeming ease belies the anxiety and emotion that advisers say he brings to his historic position: pride in what he has accomplished, determination to acquit himself well and intense frustration.”

On Dylan Yount, a man who jumped from a San Francisco building, and the people who watched, recorded and, in some cases, encouraged his suicide.

In a matter of months she became one of the world’s most famous porn stars. Three years later, she was dead. The rise and fall of Savannah.

Sallie Belling was an inspirational figure in her community for having overcome a childhood of abuse, drugs, and prostitution — a childhood her sister Rachel says is pure fiction.

Welcome to Wakaliwood, where a resourceful producer in the slums of Kampala makes action movies like Who Killed Captain Alex? Uganda’s First Action Movie for about $200 apiece.

They were florists working in Amsterdam’s largest flower market. They were also members of one of the most powerful arms of the Italian mafia. An investigation into how organized crime has gone global.

Microprocessors cost billions to develop. They take three times longer to build than an airplane, in an environment 1,000 times more sterile than a hospital. Throughout the entire process, nobody ever touches them.