How Vivitrol, a little-known anti-addiction drug, became the mandatory treatment for opioid abuse in drug courts across the United States.

On a November morning, Olympic rower and financial advisor Harold Backer left for a bike ride and never returned. His disappearance remained a mystery – until letters began arriving at the homes of his investors.

For decades, the lead actor at an acclaimed storefront Chicago theater beat, groped, and choked his female co-stars in front of audiences, while manipulating them into coercive relationships offstage.

In 1991, Edwin Debrow shot and killed a cab driver on the east side of San Antonio. He was twelve years old. Twenty-five years later, he is still in prison. Is that justice? And is there room for mercy?

“Most of us should be in jail for the things we do. We just haven’t been caught. No one’s gone after us.”

How a Northern Californian rapper ended up facing life after being hired to produce a CD titled Generations of United Norteños – Till Eternity that may have served as a recruiting tool for the prison gang Nuestra Familia.

Próspera was supposed to be a privatized, Silicon Valley-funded paradise—but it’s a hard sell for the neighbors.

Pirates could be found in nearly every Atlantic port city. But only particular locations became known as “pirate nests,” a pejorative term used by royalists and customs officials. Many of the most notorious pirates began their careers in these ports. Others established even deeper ties by settling in these cities and becoming respected members of the local elite. Instead of the snarling drunken fiends that parade through children’s books, these pirates spent their booty on pigs and chickens, hoping to live a more placid and financially secure life on land.

“For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero.”

Inside the ultra-Orthodox Jewish rally at Citi Field to discuss the dangers of the internet:

A man in a black fur hat asked him what, exactly, was an app, and he explained it to him. The man grimaced and walked away.

A teenage clerk dialed 911. How should the brothers who own CUP Foods pay for what happened next?

The pandemic offered an unprecedented opportunity for the researchers who study why and how we dream.

Lockheed Martin is the largest government contractor in history. They train TSA workers and Guantanamo interrogators. Every American household pays them around $260 per year in taxes. The new military industrial complex is a single company.

“We are so screwed it’s beyond what most of us can imagine.”

A profile of Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountain climber of all time.

What remains of the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

On the psychology of a rescue worker after years of responding to disaster.

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word “pioneer”. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read: “Warning, you are being watched and recorded.” When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighbourhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This neighbourhood, he told me, needs “more people like you”. He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up”.

Excerpted from Notes From No Man’s Land

After all these years, it’s still there, in the back of her mind, lurking. No matter how good things are going, it never quite goes away, this feeling that she should have died that day. And her brush with death is the first thing that strangers tend to notice about her, like a limp or a disfigurement. Once they find out where she went to high school, that’s all they want to talk about.

Professional wrestling as the epitome of American capitalism.

On the failure of Minnesota’s child-protection agencies.

Lessons from the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.

The science of acquired savant syndrome.

A profile of Gina Rinehart, the richest person in Australia.