The plot to turn Texas blue.

On the attempt to rehabilitate Afghanistan’s child jihadis.

What happened to the only child who survived the 1985 MOVE bombing.

The hedge funders who tried to give away a fortune anonymously.

On the president’s campaign to crack down on campus rape.

A survivor of child abuse refuses to be silenced.

The complexities of offering aid to a Syrian refugee camp.

One rancher has a plan to save the endangered rhinoceros: domesticate them.

The struggle to build a wine industry in rural China.

The discovery of a new human ancestor, hidden in a hard-to-access cave.

A stripping trip to Florida gone horribly astray told across 158 tweets.

One woman’s attempt to break the speed record on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Morcellation was supposed to make gynecological surgeries easier on women. Instead, is it killing them.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

On applying to work as an undercover agent.

What one learns about Jose Canseco while trying, unsuccessfully, to interview Jose Canseco.

What happened to Air France Flight 447?

The surreal existence of an AOL content writer:

I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from “Law & Order,” “Family Guy,” “Dancing With the Stars,” the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie.

Living on your parents’ farm while pregnant changes your relationship to time.

The East India Company was once “too big to fail.”

On the stupid things people say to the elderly.

On playing chess and waiting to get arrested.

In which the author’s wife attempts to break the world record in Tetris.

Joining the water company’s “flushermen” to tour London’s sewers.