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.

A profile of Chencho Dorji, Bhutan’s first psychiatrist, who has treated “more than 5,300 depressed, anxious, psychotic and drug-addled” people since 1999.

In many parts of America, like Corinth, Miss., judges are locking up defendants who can’t pay—sometimes for months at a time.

Match Group, which owns most major online dating services, screens for sexual predators on Match—but not on Tinder, OkCupid or Plenty of Fish. A spokesperson said, “There are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products.”

The Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918 reached virtually every country, killing so many people so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses.

Some cops give their friends and family union-issued “courtesy cards” to help get them out of minor infractions. The cards embody everything wrong with modern policing.

Over the past five years, the Syrian government has killed almost 700 medical personnel. Inside the race to spread medical knowledge as the Assad regime erases it.

How an obscure Australian judge and a hard-charging lawyer put the S&P on trial for the global financial collapse.

The search for the missing Holocaust hero began in 1945. The unending quest tore his family apart.

Searching for (and easily finding) Mark Augustus Landis, the man behind the “longest, strangest forgery spree the American art world has known.”

David Boies argued Bush v. Gore all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost the case, but in the process gained another client: Harvey Weinstein.

The rare Chilean soapbark tree produces compounds that can boost the body’s reaction to vaccines.

Making bio-diesel is hard. Getting paid $100 million to not make it is surprisingly easy.

During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word “pioneer”. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read: “Warning, you are being watched and recorded.” When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighbourhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This neighbourhood, he told me, needs “more people like you”. He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up”.

Excerpted from Notes From No Man’s Land

The Constitution and its worshippers.

“Two weeks before Christmas, I was explaining to a friend in town that if I seemed more distressed than usual, it was just because I was trying to accustom myself to the fact that my cat didn’t want to be my cat anymore. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Here’s what you do: You just call Dawn.’ And then she gave me the cat psychic’s phone number.”

“Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.”

A profile of Maine’s two U.S. senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

Stephen Bannon and Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, have long shared a vision for remaking America. Now the nation’s top law-enforcement agency can serve as a tool for enacting it.

Last August, contaminated water escaped from an abandoned mine in Colorado and traveled down the Animas River to Shiprock, the second-largest city in the Navajo Nation. Two weeks later, the EPA declared the sludge-filled river safe.