On the increasingly dangerous situation for journalists in Syria.

On the ground in post-disaster Japan.

Why the US intervened in Libya.

Adventures in something called “Radical Honesty.”

Practicing photography in Switzerland.

The Castro, 1990, and a first night in drag.

On the ground in Wilmington.

A quest for tigers in India.

How order collapsed in an American city.

On the suicide crisis in rural East Texas.

The fight for female superheroes in Hollywood.

In a nondescript office park in suburban Florida, a company you’ve never heard of is making a product that few people have ever seen. And it has $1.4 billion in funding.

The developer responsible for the tallest residential building in New York—the penthouse just sold for $90 million—lives in a two-story house in Queens.

Mark Karpelès ran the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until a heist made it insolvent, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement in Japanese prison.

“It’s insanity to kill your father with a kitchen knife. It’s also insanity to close hospitals, fire therapists, and leave families to face mental illness on their own.”

Justin Vivian Bond found downtown fame as Kiki DuRane, decrepit drag chanteuse and comedic prophet of gay rage born out of the AIDS era. Then he killed Kiki to try to become the woman (and man) he always wanted to be.

He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

The women would walk 10 miles from the village to the meat packing plants. Their pay supported drunk husbands and hungry children. When they were told to stop, they broke with tradition and went to the law.

An early attempt to explain the world-changing power of computer software—and the minds of young programmers like Bill Gates—to a mass audience. “Software,” the article begins, “is the magic carpet to the future.”

“The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side.”

Kate del Castillo, the actress who brought Sean Penn to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, tells her side of the story.

“The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.”

The Darién Gap is a lawless wilderness on the border of Colombia and Panama teeming with everything from deadly snakes to antigovernment guerrillas. For many migrants, crossing it is their only way to get to America.