Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house.

Three teenage boys from a remote island decide to set sail after a night of drinking. They go missing for 51 days.

During WWII, a bomber crashes into the Pacific and the crewmen begin an epic battle against dehydration, exposure, and endless attacks by sharks. Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

The Estonia was carrying 989 people when it sank on its way across the Baltic in September 1994. Only 140 lived.

Swept out by a riptide, a father and his autistic son find themselves in open water after dark.

The first extended telling of the story that would eventually become The Perfect Storm.

In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently during a storm and dumped a load of plastic bath toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—into the open sea.

A trip to visit a friend in prison.

In defense of snark.

How a comedy writer making $300,000 a year ended up homeless.

An odyssey through America’s mental health system.

The thin, resentful line between comic and audience.

The emotional toll on drone pilots.

A clandestine meeting between Western journalists and Hezbollah fighters in a Beirut strip mall.

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

Inside the attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

After the storms, a man tries to find his lost cat.

A doctor and a rabbi try to find ways to understand the world, and God, and one another.

A woman’s communications and interactions with a potential criminal.

A dirty story about delicate hands.

A story about love letters and failed connections.

Collusion, sabotage, violence—inside Montreal’s no-holds-barred snow removal racket.

First chill, then stupor, then letting go.

In 1912, 300 miles deep on a trek into the uncharted Antarctic wilderness, Douglas Mawson lost most of his crew and supplies. This is the story of how he got back.

A dispatch from eastern Siberia, a realm of steel-shattering cold and nullifying vastness sometimes called “the white hell.”

In 2001, a young Japanese woman walked into the North Dakota woods. Had she come in search of the $1 million dollars buried by a fictional character in the film Fargo?

How the ski town of the super-rich responds to global warming.

The avalanche at Tunnel Creek.

A trip to the Iditarod.