How the United States came to spend more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined.

Last fall, a team of American Special Forces arrived in Nerkh, a district just west of Kabul. Six months later, amid allegations of torturing and murdering locals, the team was gone. Shortly after they left, the remains of 10 missing villagers were found outside their vacated base. An investigation into a possible war crime.

On decorated sniper Chris Kyle and the troubled young veteran who took his life.

After two tours in Iraq, the writer returns to a volatile region of Afghanistan as an embedded journalist.

As NATO leaves, the Afghan National Army grapples with a resilient Taliban.

“They cruise the city in chauffeured cars, blasting rap, selling pot to classmates. How some of New York’s richest kids joined forces with some of its poorest.”

Georgia and Patterson Inman, 15-year-old twins, are the only living heirs to the $1 billion Duke tobacco fortune. They are also emotional wrecks who have barely survived a hellacious childhood.

On the brother of the Sultan of Brunei, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, who has “probably gone through more cash than any other human being on earth.”

An overachiever on what he did and didn’t learn at Princeton.

A profile of Paris Hilton at the height of her fame.

An invite-only social network for Georgetown assholes.

How two sisters, heirs to the Bronfman fortune, may have blown $100 million supporting the cult-like group NXIVM.

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.”

Maintaining order behind bars.

How, and why, a 34-year-old woman named Charity Johnson tricked people all over the country into believing she was still in high school.

On the Cold War and the Space Race.

“Big things have enormous beginnings.”

The story of one of the 74,000 children who come to this country each year alone and undocumented.

In the gentrifying Bywater, the intertwined destinies of a legendary gay pool-bar and a woman who was drugged there.

On Ferguson, Cosby, and what ‘racial progress’ really means.

The old axiom that more is better is no longer true.

Opening up about medical mistakes.

Nancy and Frank Howard were happily married for three decades. Then he fell in love with another woman, embezzled $30 million, and hired a parade of inept hit men to kill her.