From equipment that doesn’t fit to an ill-equipped VA medical system.

On a U.S. soldier burned to the verge of death and the virtual-reality video game doctors used as treatment when he came home.

An artifact from the height of the uproar:

Behind the tawdriest of headlines, there's a woman I wouldn't mind bringing home to mom.

A writer’s trip home to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the racetrack inextricably linked with the histories of his family and his hometown.

A college president on the bizarre experience of being informed by NBC News that he had hired a war criminal to teach French.

Both the Chinese government and private matchmakers are laboring to unite people who lost spouses and children in the earthquake.

In the wake of 9/11, terrorist networks moved their recruitment and training efforts online, giving birth to Jihad-geeks like Irhabi_007.

The Great Recession meant great things for Nick Popovich, who gets paid by banks to take planes back from hard-up millionaires.

Foreign policy as architecture; how embassies went from lavish social hubs to reinforced strongholds.

Why did a veteran BBC on-air personality confess on camera to a mercy killing he did not commit?

On Ayn Rand becoming a cult hero to Wall Street insiders and others items that make Matt Taibbi angry.

On what you come to appreciate after a short apprenticeship with paramedics.

The profile that led to the Massey Energy CEO’s resignation.

What it takes to recover from a near-death brawl with a bear.

“In 2000, Zimbabwe’s dictator began kicking white farmers off their land. One man decided to stay.”

It took Nav Sarao a long time to accept that he might have been scammed out of $50 million.

A profile of the man who teaches America’s police to be “sheepdogs.”

"The honesty in Perfume Genius’s music has attracted him a devoted audience, and he receives a lot of messages on Twitter from young kids going through the process of coming out, or dealing with their own addictions. “I think people come to my music just to feel less lonely,” he says. “When I write, sometimes I think, What would I have liked to have heard when I was younger?” But on his new record, out this May, he aimed for something a little more developed: essentially, he wanted to make a grown-up album about life after you’ve trudged through the trauma."

The elite Iraqi “Golden Division” was trained by the US to hunt terrorists. But now they’re locked in a brutal street battle for control of Mosul.

What it feels like to get hit by a major league fastball.

How a Russian-born Canadian 23-year-old invented Ethereum, the first cryptocurrency to seriously challenge Bitcoin.

The complicated life and death of Hideki Irabu, a pitcher who was supposed to become a Yankee legend and found heartache instead.

The mysterious business interests trying to patent strains and turn their company into the Monsanto of legal marijuana.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

“Who we become has so much to do with the experiences we had, and how we survived.”