A new pro league is paying teenagers six figures to quit high school for basketball.

She was the biggest tipper the waiters at some of the country’s most gourmet restaurants had ever seen. She treated casual acquaintances to elaborate vacations. Few saw the tiny bungalow where she lived amongst hundreds of boxes of unopened jewelry, and none knew the source of her wealth. When her multi-decade embezzlement scheme was revealed, the artisans and waitstaff whose lives had been changed by her generosity were left to sort out the pieces and consider their own relationship to her scam.

Why dealing with the IRS is so difficult – and the woman charged with making it easier:

[Nina] Olson noted that the IRS relied on computers to audit all but the highest-income brackets. “We’re getting to a situation where the only people who will get face-to-face audits are the 1 Percent,” she said. “For the majority of taxpayers, the IRS has become faceless, nameless, with no accountability and no liability.”

“What I do is not magical realism. I do realistic magic. Look, whenever someone does something new, people have to compare it with things they already know. So even if you innovate, you end up being connected to the past. When I began making movies people linked me to Fellini or Buñuel. Now new filmmakers are called ‘jodorowskian.’”

A trip to Turkey for a soccer game between bitter rivals and its accompanying madness.

The story of Soylent, a Silicon Valley concoction designed to replace your meals.

“Someone has sliced open soccer’s hourglass, and the sand has come pouring out on to the streets.”

Privacy, memory, data and advertising—how the modern web has become a Ponzi scheme and how we might be able to fix it.

How the Ebola virus works.

A trip to The Villages, a booming retiremement community outside Orlando, where the golf is free, casual sex is everywhere, and there is no cemetery.

A profile of the novelist, who is surprised to be alive.

The story of one of the 74,000 children who come to this country each year alone and undocumented.

Sam Simon made a fortune from The Simpsons. Now, diagnosed with terminal cancer, he is racing to spend it.

On Nigeria’s citizen vigilantes who’ve banded together to fight Islamist terrorists.

A profile of Christine Quinn, odds-on favorite to be the next mayor of New York City.

How Curtis Duffy overcame his parents’ murder-suicide to become one of the nation’s great chefs.

Applying big data analysis to Internet Adult Film Database, the IMDB of porn.

The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it.

Catching up with the controversial radio host, who recently returned to the air after years away.

The story of a device that delivers electric shocks to students at a school for special needs.

Fat doesn’t make us fat. So why has science led us to believe otherwise?

The 22-year-old rapper on escaping North Long Beach and his desire to be a “regular” guy.

On ISDS, the parallel legal universe created by international treaties that allows corporations to sue countries and escape punishment.

“Today it’s a mosquito. Tomorrow God only knows what is going to happen.”