On Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr and now Slack, a wildly popular, difficult-to-describe messaging service that has 38,000 paying subscribers just a few months after launching.

“If you take the chance, sometimes you’ll find something so magnificent that it was worth dying for, and sometimes you’ll find nothing and have a horrible night. To go deeper with it, that’s the most interesting challenge.”

In exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to build his own jail, complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23 years later, it’s a home for the elderly.

“I want to tell a different story, the more common yet strangely hidden one, which is that I don’t feel guilty and tortured about my abortion. Or rather, my abortions. There, I said it.”

“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.”

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.

In 1980, Richard Pryor doused himself in rum, lit himself, and streaked though the streets or Northridge in a ball of flames. He would go on to live another 25 years.

The outgoing treasury secretary on his financial crisis regrets, putting policy before politics, and whether Washington will ever be able to strike a grand bargain.

“We can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money.”

It’s tempting to think Marco McMillian was killed because of his race, his sexuality, or because he was running for mayor. The truth is more elusive.

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.

Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling needed funding for his ambitious video-game startup. Rhode Island politicians needed jobs and a vision for how to transform the state’s beleaguered economy. The story of a $75 million bet gone bust.

“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.”

The controversial history of WI-38, a cell strain created from an aborted fetus “that has arguably helped to save more lives than any other created by researchers.”

How the heir to a horse racing empire became an informant on the Zetas cartel as they pushed their money laundering operations into the lucrative quarter horse trade.

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.”

“The concussion that led Borland to retire came on a routine play, and that’s precisely his point.”

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.

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.

It’s highly unlikely that a gigantic space rock will crash through our atmosphere and destroy civilization as we know it. But it’s not impossible either. Which is why a small but growing community of scientists and astronomers are scrambling to spot and destroy dangerous asteroids long before they hit us.

The whole thing began over a puddle in the driveway. Eight years later, Peter Nygard and his neighbor Louis Bacon, who own houses next to each other in paradise, have spent tens of millions in a constantly escalating legal war. Neither man spends much time on the island anymore.

How cops are using nuisance abatement actions to put New Yorkers on the streets.

“She taught me the tricks of trimming. She taught me to smile when my back ached. She taught me some Bengali words. Sab bhalo. It is all okay.”

Traveling with a sex tourist to the Uzbek city of Tashkent. Excerpted from the forthcoming book If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai.