As a young community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama concluded that to make a real difference, he needed to gain power. A look at how that plan has worked thus far.

“It was creepy to wake up violently in the middle of the night. It was creepier when no one could tell me why it was happening.”

A profile of Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Published originally in GQ Russia.

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.

Afghanistan’s Kyrgyz nomads survive in one of Earth’s most remote places, a pocket of land 14,000 feet high where the currency is sheep, the dream is a road, and many will go an entire lifetime without ever seeing a tree.

On Luddites, “bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry,” and their literary spawn.

How a longtime gambling addict and a small band of his cronies manipulated both the game and betting exchanges from a tiny Berlin cafe, going as far as buying ownerships of teams in order to insure their failure.

“The mythical image of Malick that has been built up over the last 30-odd years is, in essence, a creation of the same media corps with whom the filmmaker himself has continually chosen not to engage.”

Al Seckel held legendary parties in the 1980s and 90s, with attendees ranging from Slash to Francis Crick. He later became a collector of optical illusions and gave a TED talk on the topic. He may have also misled and defrauded many of the people he came into contact with.

The men and the women of the transactional-love economy. “A thing you should know is that there are very few people to root for in this story.”

A profile of Judy Clarke, who takes on the most heinous, notorious defendants in America, trying to save them from the death penalty. Until Dzokhar Tsarnaev, she usually succeeded.

A talk on personal data and the people who collect it:

"Let me ask a trick question. What was the most damaging data breach in the last 12 months? The trick answer is: it's likely something we don't even know about."

Australian Rocky Perone, age 21, made his minor league baseball debut with a stolen base in 1974. Except he wasn’t Australian, wasn’t named Rocky Perone and most definitely wasn’t 21.

The ragtag group of fighters from America and Europe who joined the fight against extremists in Syria don’t seem to know what they are doing.

When rival gangs confronted each other in the parking lot of a Hooters-esque restaurant, bullets flew. But was the whole a police setup?

With three shows currently in production, Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee and American Horror Story, is one of the few show runners whose name commands an audience.

The Giant Pacific Octopus is, in the words of a Seattle conservationist, a “glamour animal.” It is also tasty. Therein lies the conflict.

During his nearly six years in the Air Force, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant flew hundreds of missions and logged almost 6,000 hours of flight time. He killed or helped kill 1,626 people. And he never left Nevada.

Separating truth from lore in Haiti: “The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said—but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.”

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

When its informant’s cover was blown, German intelligence destroyed his files. Did his handlers fail to pick up a violent cell that would eventually murder nine immigrants and a cop in order to preserve their asset?

A behind-the-scenes look at a U.S. attack against civilians near Khod: “the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.”

A profile Mark Pincus, the founder and C.E.O. of Zynga—the company that created FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker game in the world.

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.