A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

Jamie Smith said he was a co-founder of Blackwater and a former CIA officer. He appeared on cable news as a counterterrorism expert and he received millions in goverment contracts to train personnel. The money was real. The resume wasn’t.

On Forever 21 and the rise of “fast fashion”:

They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly.

A West Hollywood aesthetician made headlines after allegedly trying to have a business rival killed. But the real story, involving ongoing harassment and a member of the so-called Bling Ring, may be more complicated.

When 25-year-old Valentine Strasser seized power in Sierra Leone in 1992, he became the world’s youngest head of state. Today he lives with his mother and spends his days drinking gin by the roadside.

David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has written a new Obama biography expected to be a best-seller. His frugal streak has kept his staff intact. And yet, after a dozen years, he’s still the new guy at Condé Nast.

After one of the most decisive wins in Kentucky Derby history, Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, ending a promising career and beginning a herculean effort to save his life.

It all started with an unclaimed lottery ticket worth millions, soon revealing a string of unlikely winners that pointed to an inside job. But who had rigged the lottery? And how?

Can a violent adult jail teach kids to love school? A rare look inside one of the only high schools at an adult jail

Known abroad primarily for its stunning Pacific Coast setting and athletic lifestyle, the city [Vancouver] has since become one of the world’s largest sluices for questionable funds moving from Asia into Western economies.

In a small Minnesota town, an IT technician found his way to the darkest corner of the web. Then he made a deadly plan.

At Lucky Peach and the Los Angeles Times, Peter Meehan reshaped food media. Now his former employees are coming forward to describe the cost of his leadership.

A recent raid in Italy involving rare Chilean species highlights the growing scale of a black market in the thorny plants.

just three months, we have seen Charlie and Tessy through a lifetime of crises — temporary sobriety, meth binges, two stints in jail, three moves, one eviction, several religious, end-of-the-world texts on our phones, a dozen different phones and phone numbers (meth addicts go through “Obama Phones” like packs of cigarettes), and a stay in a psychiatric hospital. Every day brings some kind of cruel surprise, some hardship that would pummel me, but is just business as usual for them.

A profile of Merle Haggard.

A profile of Henry Hook, crossword puzzle master.

An examination of Mitt Romney’s record on abortion.

The llamas, the dress, and the day the internet broke.

The story of Robert Quinones:

Fifteen months of carnage in Iraq had left the 29-year-old debilitated by post-traumatic stress disorder. But despite his doctor’s urgent recommendation, the Army failed to send him to a Warrior Transition Unit for help. The best the Department of Veterans Affairs could offer was 10-minute therapy sessions — via videoconference. So, early on Labor Day morning last year, after topping off a night of drinking with a handful of sleeping pills, Quinones barged into Fort Stewart’s hospital, forced his way to the third-floor psychiatric ward and held three soldiers hostage, demanding better mental health treatment.

The Cosmo editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl’s rocky real-life relationships.

They were an organized group of ex-strippers, plus a few role players recruited from Craigslist. They fished for marks in strip clubs, Wall Street cocktail bars, and even TGI Fridays, and then lured them to strip clubs. The marks woke up with little memory of the night before and their credit cards maxed out.

In the summer of 1982, three Waco teenagers were savagely murdered for no apparent reason. Four men were ultimately charged with the crime. One was executed, two others were given life sentences, and a fourth was sent to death row only to be released after six years. They all may have been innocent.

Henry Heimlich saved untold choking victimes when he invented his maneuver in 1974. Since then, he’s searched in vain for another miracle treatment—pushing ethical boundaries along the way. Now at the end of his career, Heimlich has hired an investigator to find an anonymous critic working full-time to destroy his legacy.

Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives.