How a childhood of anger led the founder of 8chan to create one of the darkest corners of the internet.

An essay on televangelists and a missing mother.

Inside Facebooks war on hate speech.

On India’s Covid catastrophe.

On Black revision, repayment, and renewal.

Requiem for a viral hit.

The search for a missing soldier.

On trying, and failing, to qualify for the USA Olympic Marathon Trials.

Eleven years ago, three-year-old Audrey Santo fell into a pool. She nearly drowned. Much of her brain died. She cannot speak, can only barely move. And every Wednesday, pilgrims show up at her family’s house, ready for a miracle.

Thousands of people have waded into New Mexico’s high desert searching for a small chest filled with millions in gold, jewels, and jade. Randy Bilyeu never made it back.

The anatomy of a scandal.

He was the poster boy for the movement to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now Dan Choi is sleeping on a couch, smoking too much weed, watching TED talks and wondering what he’ll do with the rest of his life.

The chef, who died last year, was one of San Francisco’s culinary stars in the 1990s. She created a space for the city’s queer women to thrive in the kitchen.

A profile of Kermit Oliver, a reclusive, critically acclaimed artist who designs scarves for Hermès and works nights at the Waco post office.

In the midst of a national crisis, mothers addicted to drugs struggle to get off them — for their babies’ sake, and their own.

A cloud enthusiast becomes an advocate for a new type of cloud.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Six months after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, a member of the Presidential commission that investigated the crash presents his personal findings.

An oral history of Industrial Lights & Magic, which gave birth to Star Wars and countless films, as well as playing a hand in the creation of Photoshop and Pixar.

A profile of the comedian who’s “not so funny anymore”:

Jon Stewart has made a career of avoiding "Whooo" humor. He has flattered the prejudices of his audience, but he has always been funny, and he has always made them laugh. At the Juan Williams taping, however, at least half of Stewart's jokes elicited the sound of Whooo! instead of the sound of laughter. He's been able to concentrate his comedy into a kind of shorthand — a pause, or a raised eyebrow, is often all that is necessary now — but a stranger not cued to laugh could be forgiven for not laughing, indeed for thinking that what was going on in front of him was not comedy at all but rather high-toned journalism with a sense of humor. Which might be how Jon Stewart wants it by now.

The absurd scale of McDonald’s’ economics suggests a company more like a commodity trader than a chain of restaurants.

At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.

Carried away by love—for risk and for each other—two of the world’s best freedivers went to the limits of their sport. Only one came back.

In 1913, a ship carrying 31 explorers got stuck in the Arctic ice, hundreds of miles from civilization. The leader left to carry on the expedition. Others stuck with the boat. Help wouldn’t come for a year.

On the rise of alt meat and the decline of cattle.

In 2017, the Hall of Fame Louisville coach’s career collapsed under a string of scandals, leading to his firing from the school he had coached for 16 years. Now, Pitino is finding himself in Greece, coaching Panathinaikos, working for a self-styled Bond villain, and enjoying a new chapter of his life.

A species of jellyfish that can transform itself back to a polyp at any time appears to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.