On May 12, 2014, Nicole Holder told Charlotte police that she had been assaulted by Greg Hardy. He was arrested, charged, and convicted. Then the case was dismissed on appeal. After a season out of the league, Hardy is playing for the Dallas Cowboys. Owner Jerry Jones has called him a “real leader.”

This is the story, and the photos, of what happened that night.

When Isis rounded up Yazidi women and girls in Iraq to use as slaves, the captives drew on their collective memory of past oppressions – and a powerful will to survive.

“Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.”

“For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has a political party that is ideologically cohesive, disciplined, and determined to take power, even at the cost of disrupting the political system.”

In the 1980s, Billy Ray Bates, once dubbed “the Legend,” drank himself out of the NBA and ended up playing in the Philippines. For a few wild years, his legend grew—both on the court and in the bars.

The search for an anonymous amateur philosopher.

When the U.S. Postal Service was a hotbed for innovation.

John MacNeil was convicted by the state of Massachusetts of second-degree murder. He was given a life sentence. He escaped. He was caught. Through an incredible feat of jailhouse lawyering, he somehow got himself paroled and exiled to Canada. Then he came home.

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.

A profile of The Rock, the best friend you didn’t know you had.

A DHL tycoon’s small plane disappeared near the Phillipines amidst rumors of children fathered with teenage Asian villagers. Every scrap of his DNA went missing, but that didn’t stop a forensic mathematician.

A conversation with NYU Law Professor Philip Alston on the legality of ‘targeted killings’ by drones, which have made headlines in Pakistan, but also have been deployed by the C.I.A. in countries like Yemen.

Theresa Buchanan, a professor at LSU, “used the f-word in class, overshared about her personal life, and could be brutally candid in her critiques of the student teachers under her tutelage.” Should she have been fired?

For decades, the United States and Britain’s vision of democracy and freedom defined the postwar world. What will happen in an age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?

In the British sport of “ferret legging,” underwear-less competitors tie their trousers at the ankles, stuff a pair of the carnivores down there, and hold on for as long as possible. Reg Mellor is the world’s best.

The women of the alt-right.

Conversations with the petroleum brotherhood in the UAE.

Obama’s presidency may well be defined by whether or not he can curb unemployment. Step One: find a decent idea.

On Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, basketball is about much more than winning.

The Bitcoin ghostwriter who wasn’t.

Eco-tourism in the Himalayas.

The valley is everything you'd want and more. An icy milky river thunders over rocks and below steep wooded slopes are lush fields where people are working the land, oblivious to the Gore-Tex procession. Oblivious but not unaffected: the houses are smart, the prayer wheels freshly painted, just about everyone has a mobile phone, it seems, and is on it, and there are very few places you can't get a signal around here. This is not really the place to come if you're looking for peace and quiet.

A history of the ultimate political weapon, which we’ve never understood how to use.

Calculating restitution for victims of child pornography.