These Boston high school valedictorians set off to change the world. But good grades only got them so far. Is Boston failing its brightest students? A five-part series about the students left behind.

A social and financial divide is forming—between those who have student debt, and those who do not—that will have ramifications for decades to come.

You learn to believe in your child’s existence. What happens when she’s killed by a piece of your daily environment?

Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube, where he was pulled into a world filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny and racism.

The retired senator Mike Gravel gave two young fans his Twitter password and permission to campaign in his name. It might be a stunt—or the future of politics.

With state legislatures passing new abortion restrictions, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund follows its own compass on how to best help clients.

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran. The declassified story that became Ben Affleck’s Argo.

In experiments on pig organs, scientists at Yale made a discovery that could someday challenge our understanding of what it means to die.

A giant earthquake is coming to the Northwest. Unfortunately, no one knows when.

A Montana rancher found two skeletons in combat—the Dueling Dinosaurs. But who do they belong to, and will the public ever see them?

Border Patrol agent Matthew Bowen had been investigated for years before he used his 4,000-pound truck to assault a fleeing migrant.

From the proto-bleep to meta-bleep: how the US government protects us from the profane.

Fentanyl is quickly becoming America’s deadliest drug. But law enforcement couldn’t trace it to its source—until one teenager overdosed in North Dakota.

Florida lawmakers agreed the state’s old drug sentencing laws went too far. But that means nothing to people serving time.

Kross cuts through the moans and shouts from off-camera: “Someone go wide!” She’s telling the cameramen to make sure they are adequately capturing the reverse gang bang of Ferrara—the love of her life.

It was one of the most arresting viral photos of the year: a horde of climbers clogged atop Mount Everest. But it only begins to capture the deadly realities of what transpired that day at 29,000 feet.

An interview with Cleve Backster, a former interrogation specialist with the CIA who used a polygraph machine in the 1960s to develop his theory of “primary perception,” which contends that plants have feelings.

An interview with Allee Willis, the late songwriter behind Earth Wind & Fire’s “September” and the Friends theme song, on creating the world you want to live and work in and throwing virtual parties.

Carrying babies for foreign couples was once touted as a win-win for everyone involved. Indian women, however, were often left with little to show for their efforts.

Stare at the game long enough and the distance between everything—players, league, game, court, self, other—begins to collapse. Everything becomes a metaphor for everything else, the league and your life each generating infinite layers of meaning for the other.

People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it’s a beacon of so much that’s right.

More migrants than ever are crossing the Colombia-Panama border to reach the U.S. Five days inside the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous journeys in the world.

Federal agencies have hired contractors with no experience to find respirators and masks, fueling a black market filled with price gouging and multiple layers of profiteering brokers. One contractor called them “buccaneers and pirates.”

My mother’s eyes traced what was happening with happiness of a child. When she asked my father how it was possible, he thought she was asking about the flowers, but she wasn’t. She was asking how it was possible to see this much beauty at once.

Over the past 14 years, Martin Guth has built a monopoly on some of the world’s rarest birds. Will his secretive organization ultimately help put more parrots in the wild, as he says or—push them closer to extinction?