Lauren spent six years of her childhood locked in a closet, starved and tortured by her birth mother and stepfather. Miraculously, she survived; that’s when her long road to recovery began.

A profile of personal finance guru Dave Ramsey, who built his biblically inspired get-out-of-debt empire on the premise “it’s within your power to not take part in recessions and the economic troubles facing American families.”

Peter Zumthor, who recently won the Pritzker Prize after a career of few buildings and mostly modest-in-size projects, on the “architecture of actually making things”

What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they “grow” their students’ test scores? Colorado is about to find out.

How a musical subculture evolved alongside a technological subculture:

Rave's rise mirrors the Web's in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward "free spaces" with special appeal to geeks and wonks.

How Tim Durham funded a libertine lifestyle—dozens of luxury cars, Playboy-themed parties, a plethora of failed businesses—on the backs of unwitting Ohioans, many of them Amish.

One day you’re teaching yourself to play the piano in hotel lobbies, the next you’re contributing a song to a David Lynch soundtrack.

How technological progress slowed from its 20th-century peak, why we’ve shifted from changing reality to simply simulating reality, and whether capitalism is the true culprit.

Helg Sgarbi had perfected the art of seducing, swindling, and blackmailing ultra-rich women across Europe. Fleecing a billionaire BMW heiress should have been the crowning achievement of his career.

“The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.” –Steve Jobs, 1996

Raffaello Follieri was young, handsome. He was Italian. He was dating Anne Hathaway, hobnobbing with Bill Clinton, and using contacts at the Vatican to launch a lucrative business in the States. Then he was in jail.

If your ex-spouse takes your child and hightails it abroad, the legal system often isn’t on your side. So what can you do? One option: hire a former Army ranger named Gus Zamora to take back your kid.

After nearly a year in Afghanistan—during which almost half of their unit was killed or injured—paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne have one more mission before they go home.

DecorMyEyes is a online eyewear store with an unusual business plan; the owner harasses and intimidates customers who complain in order to get negative reviews posted across the web, in turn making his website more visible to Google searchers.

Susie Mc­Kinnon cannot hold a grudge. She is unfamiliar with the feeling of regret and oblivious to aging. She has no core memories. And yet she knows who she is.

A profile of Martha Nussbaum, whose ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion.

On the story we tell ourselves about artificial intelligence.

What happens when an impoverished island nation enters into a deal to sell its own citizenship in bulk.

Google and Tesla are spending billions to develop driverless technology. George Hotz used an Acura.

Bill Ackman’s hedge fund planned to make a fortune while doing good by exposing Herbalife as a scheme that preyed upon and lied to the poor. How one of the highest profile stock shorts in market history went awry.

Every year, thousands of teenagers from one city in Nigeria risk death and endure forced labor and sex work on the long route to Europe.

From a penthouse on Central Park, Guo Wengui has exposed a phenomenal web of corruption in China’s ruling elite — if, that is, he’s telling the truth.

“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.”

When a day hike in Rocky Mountain National Park ended in a grisly death, Investigative Services Branch veteran Beth Shott hit the trail, where she began unraveling a harrowing case.