Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want.

In October, Iraqi forces set out to retake Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities and ISIS’s biggest stronghold in the country. It would take them nine months and cost thousands of lives.

“The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.”

He sawed out the bottom. Nailed the crate to the telephone pole out in front of the house. New hoop. ... I’d be out there shooting until 10 at night. That’s when I started getting really good. The pole was round so you couldn’t bank the ball in. And you weren’t getting a friendly bounce on a square rim. You had to hit it dead-on, wet.

Artist Eric Bealer was living the remote, rugged good life in coastal Alaska with his wife, Pam, an MS sufferer, when they made a dramatic decision: to exit this world together, leaving behind precise instructions for whoever entered their cabin first.

From 1968-1973, the three teenage Wiggin sisters, guided by a domineering father, played their strange music at New Hampshire ballrooms and recorded a single album. The Philosophy of the World LP goes for over $500 today, but the intervening decades have not been kind to the Wiggins.

There is an alternate definition for meat, one that simply means the thing inside of the thing—i.e., the meat of a coconut or the meat of a problem. My inquiry aimed to understand the living, the dead, and the part in the middle as well, the thing inside of the thing. I’m trying to tell you why I had finally resolved to taste whale.

When she was a 15-year-old runaway, the writer was nearly killed by a truck driver. Twenty-seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

The challenges of growing up in the modern world as the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan lama.

How Singaporean mobster Tan Seet Eng, aka Dan Tan, and a global network of fixers influenced as many 680 soccer matches at the highest levels.

From Southie to Santa Monica, a gangster romance on the run.

On a little-known statistic that tracks the movement of America’s population by searching for its balance point.

A profile of organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who argues that the key to success comes from helping others.

How a Mossad agent’s desperate bid to jumpstart his career led to the exposure of two top Hezbollah plants.

“He has hit rock bottom, and he just hasn’t accepted it yet.” Basketball’s iconoclast is a broke recluse at 37.

A legal battle over stolen computer monitors ends one man’s career and the lives of three others.

After two tours in Iraq, the writer returns to a volatile region of Afghanistan as an embedded journalist.

Departing Marrakech by car with a plan to record music for the Library of Congress.

A case for why race has been the real story of the Obama presidency all along.

How to buy college football players, in the words of a man who delivers the money.

A profile of Bosnian striker Vedad Ibisevic, who has come home after escaping the war more than 20 years ago.

The railroad foreman’s brain was pierced by a tamping iron. He lived to tell the tale.

How a bipolar diagnosis follows you from the top to the bottom of professional basketball.

How the island paradise of Seychelles became a magnet for money launderers and tax dodgers.