Sharon Lopatka had found many identities on Usenet: VHS interior decoration pitch-woman, author of love spells, and pornographic film scammer. Her final posts concerned wanting to find someone to torture her to death.

Bomb makers—including ISIS—have been on a quest to obtain red mercury, a weapon reputed to be powerful enough to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” They haven’t found it yet. That might be because it doesn’t exist.

“I came to Weeki Wachee to sound the mystery of the mermaid, to find danger and sex and darkness and maybe hear my own deeps echoed back.”

Swept out to sea by a riptide, a father and his 12-year-old autistic son struggle to stay alive. As night falls, the dad comes to a devastating realization: If they remain together, they’ll drown together.

When a Qatari sheikh came to live in L.A., an entire economy sprouted to meet his wishes. “His highness doesn’t like to hear no,” one associate told a professor.

“When I was covering the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, was there a real difference between my wanting to get to the village or hospital where people were dying terrible deaths, and my wanting people to be dying terrible deaths in whatever village or hospital I happened to be going to? Every assignment presents some variation of that question.”

Nearly three decades ago, Mother Jones profiled a rising star in the Republican Party:

The divorce turned much of Carrollton against Gingrich. Jackie was well loved by the townspeople, who knew how hard she had worked to get him elected-as she had worked before to put him through college and raise his children. To make matters worse, Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor While she was still in the hospital, according to Howell, "Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.

Oskar Groening, an SS officer whose duties included counting confiscated money, describes his time posted to Auschwitz.

Uber says its drivers can earn as much as $90,000. The author decided to fact-check that number the only way she could: by becoming a driver herself.

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

Twelve years ago, a Saudi Arabian man, whom federal authorities had long suspected of having ties to terrorism, was sentenced to life in prison on multiple counts of unlawful sexual contact. To this day, al-Turki has maintained that he’s innocent and was instead the target of post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment.

In the aftermath of rape, a transition from prey to predator.

How Javaris Crittenton went from basketball phenom to standing trial on a murder charge.

What to do about climate change.

An epilogue to Serpico.

A combat veteran trains to be a college football placekicker.

The NFL attempts to set up a beachhead in China.

An Aboriginal community’s attempt to maintain a 50,000-year-old way of life.

A mother-son bus trip from Florida to Juarez.

How Wall Street got addicted to trading at the speed of light.

How war-crimes investigators captured top-secret documents tying the Syrian regime to mass murder.

In El Salvador, pregnant women have more to fear than Zika.

On Alaska’s North Slope, village schools aim to blend book learning with the Arctic reality.

Chris, a 25-year-old black man, tries to get a good job.