On the revolutionaries, highly-paid negotiators, former spies, foreign businessmen and their families, who all played roles in the massive Colombian kidnap and ransom industry during its 1990s heyday.

For the Zulu club, a black social organization in New Orleans, Mardi Gras was a joy. The coronavirus made it a tragedy.

Washington state’s redoubled climate goals and fresh action plan revive hope to cut emissions. But ongoing fossil fuel development in BC could undercut Cascadia’s progress.

If you’re one of four million Ahmadis in Pakistan, posting on Facebook can mean exposing yourself to danger.

An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.

A 90-year-old amateur archaeologist who claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb was also one of the most prolific grave robbers in modern American history.

In the 1950s, L.S.D. became a Beverly Hills’ therapy fad, and it profoundly changed idols like Cary Grant.

How Michael Manos, a.k.a. the Glam Scammer, a career con man who relied on a combination of fake reality TV shows and fake fundraisers to bilk people in Atlanta, Dallas, and D.C., finally got caught.

Inside the thriving subculture of Japanese men who eschew sex and romance with real live people in favor of real relationships with 2-D characters printed on body pillows.

On returning to Lagos after years abroad.

It is always understood when you leave Nigeria as a Nigerian that you will return at some point.

In pre-modern poetry, Shakespeare, who mentioned everything, would probably have name checked products if he could, but there were few goods with the maker’s name on them: though he would specify the street or town which had given origin to a certain cut of sleeve.

How a traveling medical technician managed to steal narcotics from hospitals, infecting at least 45 people with hepatitis C in the process.

An interview about Black Lives Matter and the last 18 months of activism in America.

The belief that hidden memories can be “recovered” in therapy has been discredited, but the mental health establishment does not always learn from its mistakes—and families are still paying the price.

On the final two holdouts in Treece, Kansas, a former mining town that is soon to be wiped off the maps.

Refugees arriving in the U.S. after receiving asylum face challenges that have led some to return to their war-torn homelands.

A reporter on her way out of India probes a case of a woman beaten to death by her husband in public.

It turns out “Madame Giselle” wasn’t any of these things, couldn’t make her Chevy Chase, Maryland, neighbors rich, and may have been at the center of a massive scandal in Colombia.

Representative Matt Shea has been trying to create a libertarian utopia in the Pacific Northwest, a 51st state called Liberty. And he keeps getting re-elected.

How do you tell the world you are grieving? In my case, it was a year-long Twitter thread about finding the things that made me feel better.

I say, Where’s Breonna, why won’t anybody say where Breonna is? He says, Well, ma’am, she’s still in the apartment. And I know what that means.

As CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub made the biggest deal the oil business had seen in years. Will it also go down as the biggest failure?

A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track... Months later, Luger — who says he was “broke as a joke” by that point, about to become a father for the second time and seriously considering taking a job stocking boxes in a warehouse — heard that same beat on the radio, transformed into a Waka song called “Hard in da Paint.” Before long, he couldn’t get away from it.