An artist takes on “the umbrella problem,” which runs so deep the U.S. Patent Office has four full-time examiners dedicated solely to assessing ideas for umbrella improvement.

How did a pair of young rappers from Scotland, laughed off the stage for their accents, land a deal with Sony and start partying with Madonna? They pretended to be American.

In the bayou south of New Orleans, a program called the Nurse-Family Partnership tries to reverse the life chances for babies born into extreme poverty. Sometimes, it actually succeeds.

On September 28, 1980, the Washington Post published a story by an ambitious young reporter about an 8-year-old boy addicted to heroin. The story won a Pulitzer. The boy didn’t exist.

“There is perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan.”

In Torreón, north of Mexico City, cartel gunmen are freed from a prison, commit a massacre at a wedding that includes the band, and then return to custody.

“You can treat a lot of people, and India has,’’ says an epidemiologist working on TB. “But if you have tests that cause misdiagnosis on a massive scale you are going to have a serious problem. And they do.”

In 1976, newly appointed Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment in the United States. Thirty years later, he argued that it’s unconstitutional. Here, he explains why he changed his mind.

“My father didn’t believe in things that were a reminder of the past because he had never had things in the past, and, more important, he had never had a past—not a past that mattered, that should be passed on to me, his son.”

Unruly teens from around the world are kidnapped by parental order and sent to ‘behaviour-modification centers’ like Tranquility Bay, a $40,000/year prison-like compound in Jamaica.

Paul Gayle wants to raise his daughter, but he needs a job and a home. What he gets is 16 lessons on fatherhood from the Obama administration.

The story of Ota Benga, captured in the Congo, displayed at the World’s Fair, and brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

“It never really worked for me to have long arguments about motivation. I think looking at your own life, on- and offscreen, you can motivate anything, or you can delude yourself into anything.”

The writer returns to his remote North Dakota hometown’s high school, then isolated with a graduating class of only 28, now even smaller but connected by the internet.

Twenty-four years ago, a Missouri father plunged a needle filled with HIV-positive blood into his son’s vein. No one at the time could’ve imagined anything worse. But even more astonishing is the life the son turned out to live.

A visit to the American base in Antarctica, an “open-air museum of prefabricated regret.”

An $140 million blockbuster written and funded by a billionaire, ‘Empires of the Deep’ was supposed to be China’s ‘Avatar,’ featuring mermaids, Greek warriors, pirates, sea monsters, and an even international stars.

Six years after being filmed, the movie has never seen the light of day.

In eight minutes, Miashah Moses took out the trash and a blaze consumed the apartment where her nieces were watching television. What happened, and who’s to blame?

Writing The Art of the Deal made Tony Schwartz rich. He still regrets it.

The archive of Mexican architect Luis Barragán has been hidden away for decades. Then an artist decided to make a performance of getting it back.

Thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future.

A Czech Libertarian planted a flag on an unclaimed island in the Danube and gave it a name. Now, the Liberland government is struggling to build its a country without taxes, political correctness, or much in the way of women.

A U.S. Marine’s journey from the Afghan war to an Illinois prison.

Suspecting he had CTE and that it would eventually kill him, a former high school football player kept a diary of what was has happening to his brain.

It started with a vague tip-off: a tug boat approaching the UK could be transporting cocaine. What followed was a race against the clock to find £500m in narcotics