One of the founders of Google discovered that he carried a gene that meant a 50% chance of developing Parkinson’s. In response, he is working to change and expedite the way that Parkinson’s research is conducted.

When the Internet made plagiarism harder, Jordan Kavoosi saw a burgeoning market for original essays. But in his empire of fake papers, it’s the writers, not the students, who get the shaft.

On January 1st, 2011, the U.S. estate tax will jump from zero to around 50%, which gives a lot of very rich elders (or perhaps more accurately, their heirs) millions of dollars in incentive to expedite death.

The story of the “Barefoot Bandit,” a teenage fugitive on the run.

When one of the best young chemists in the world took his own life, Harvard was forced to reconsider the relationship between PhD students and their (often Nobel Prize-winning) advisers.

In the British sport of “ferret legging,” underwear-less competitors tie their trousers at the ankles, stuff a pair of the carnivores down there, and hold on for as long as possible. Reg Mellor is the world’s best.

Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to connect with viewers, but video games on the topic have broken sales records.

The relative prosperity of the Putin-era has thrown Russian bride-introduction tours for a loop, as a group of American bachelors learn in a series of Meet and Greets.

An interview with Michael Maren, who spent nearly twenty years working in Africa as an aid worker and then a journalist, on why NGOs and “feed an African child” charities do more harm than good.

For the last two decades, the varied personalities behind the Vidocq Society—retired cops, sketch artists, FBI agents—have gathered in Philadelphia to tackled cold-case homicides over lunch. They claim to have solved more than half.

An interview with Douglas Hofstadter, who after winning the Pulitzer for Gödel, Escher, Bach retreated into the lab and published only sparingly in technical journals, on what it would mean if a program could generate humor and/or masterful compositions.

The cop says she nabbed an online sexual predator. He says he was just willing to chat whatever it took to get laid in real life. Their story, from both perspectives.

Arnold Weiss escaped Germany as a kid in 1938, leaving his family behind. He returned seven years later, now a U.S. intelligence officer tasked with tracking down fugitive Nazis. The ultimate revenge story.

Money from relatives abroad, the lifeline for many Afghani’s, moves primarily through small hawala</em exchanges, which shift currency through cellphones, fax lines, and trust. When money moves in Afghanistan, however, connections to the heroin trade and terrorist groups are never far.

In 2006, seven men stole £53m. Six were caught, but more than half the money remains at large. On modern money laundering best practices.

On photographing the former Norma Jeane Mortenson. “I think she was the best light comedienne we have in films today, and anyone will tell you that the toughest of acting styles is light comedy.”—Billy Wilder

A profile of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the Malibu-dwelling, “fantastically corrupt” dictator-in-waiting of Equatorial Guinea. Teodorin, as his friends call him, is considered by U.S. intelligence to be “an unstable, reckless idiot.”

First her best friend was murdered. Then her mother fell from a balcony. And finally a man she had just met was found dead in her house.

Thomas Hargrove is building software to identify trends in unsolved murders that can detect serial killers that police never knew existed.

Sheryl Waldman lived a reclusive life with her sister, Lynda, in their family’s old home. Over the years she faded from view until she vanished, and no one seemed to notice—until one cold evening last December.

South Florida is being overrun with cane toads, which can weigh almost six pounds. No one knows why they are swelling in numbers or when their population growth will slow.

How Paul Tollett gets the world’s biggest acts to perform in the California desert.

One of the most dangerous companies in the U.S. took advantage of immigrant workers. Then, when they got hurt or fought back, it used America’s laws against them.

Three targets, two 17-year-old partners, and $15,000 in getaway cash: the story of the author’s first assassination for Ramón Arellano Félix’s Tijuana cartel.

Once a Red Sox hero, Curt Schilling’s loud climb towards right-wing media fame may have cost him a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He doesn’t care.