In the ’90s, a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie exposed an AIDS epidemic in rural China and the ensuing government cover-up. Forced to leave, she’s now 85 and living alone in New York.

At a playground in North Wales, kids are mostly left alone to experiment with fire, jump from great heights and play in a creek. It’s designed to teach the value of taking risks, a lesson many American children have stopped learning.

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace.

On the ground in Nigeria with the nation’s notorious scam artists, who share a remarkable number of qualities with America’s top entrepreneurs.

In the 1970s, Kelbessa Negewo was a midlevel administrator in Ethiopia’s brutal Red Terror regime. In the 1990s, he was a bellhop in an Atlanta hotel. Then someone he had tortured back home recognized him.

An interview with Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone writer Vanessa Grigoriadis on the finer points of celebrity profiling.

A profile of John Alan Schwartz, creator of one of the most notorious movies ever made.

The story of a high school star who died minutes after hitting a game-winner to end an undefeated season, and the family and friends he left behind.

An American mystery writer and an Italian journalist join forces to identify a serial killer that targeted couples having sex in cars in the rolling hills above Florence.

Nearly 50 years ago, a penniless monk arrived in Manhattan, where he began to build an unrivaled community of followers—and a reputation for sexual abuse.

"Really, the ideas and theories we form about others and their motivations are just as much portraits of ourselves as they are descriptions of other people. It’s impossible for them to be anything else, when you think about it."

What’s the reason for Mike Tyson’s continuing appeal?

A group of Gambian exiles scattered around America plotted to storm the Presidential palace and overthrow a brutal dictator. Their budget? $221,000.

Two Paths for the Future of Text: Steven Berlin Johnson’s lecture on “commonplace” books in which great 17th and 18th century thinkers compiled their browsing, and what it means for journalism today.

Our debt, conscious or unconscious, to what has come before, and what it can tell us about copyright, the public domain, and the complicated relationship between creators and consumers.

Many experts believe it’s inevitable that in the coming decades, humans will figure out how to live considerably longer lives. It might not be a good thing.

He called himself “TheNoseDoctor” and performed sinus surgeries, many of them unnecessary, at a maniacal clip. When the whole thing fell apart, he left behind his yacht and family, and disappeared into the Alps.

Bryce Masters was 17 years old when a police officer tased him for 23 seconds. His heart stopped for almost eight minutes. His life will never be the same.

Maurice Spagnoletti was hired to clean up one of the island’s largest banks. He found fraud, waste, and executives performing Santeria rituals in the conference room. Then he was killed on his way home.

Inside the grand jury proceedings.

In the midst of a tribal burial, Jim Thorpe’s third wife burst in to remove his body, setting in motion a decades-long battle over the Native American athlete’s final resting place.

Behind the scenes with Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, and a 22-year-old film student named John Singleton.

On America’s deep and persistent fear of the black penis.

In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history.