On the dangerous state of U.K. banks—“an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal”—and how it can be fixed.

How a con man named James McCormick sold $38 million worth of phony bomb-detection devices to Iraqi authorities.

A profile of the Megaupload founder, who has started a political party in New Zealand as the U.S. continues to fight for his extradition.

A two-week island experience involving a 70-year-old interloper, his mannequin girlfriend, a couple of dogs and very little else.

How a town of 29,000 on the Hudson River came to be “one of the most dangerous four-mile stretches in the northeastern United States.”

Thousands of Korean children were sent abroad beginning in the 1950s. Now, many of them are returning to their country of origin.

Inside the attempt to turn a World War II-era antiaircraft deck (that its owner claims is an independent nation) into “the world’s first truly offshore, almost-anything-goes electronic data haven.”

“It’s an old book!” Harper Lee told a mutual friend of ours who’d seen her while I was in Monroeville. “But if someone wants to read it, fine!”

While a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, Austin Tice decided he wanted to become a war photographer. He entered Syria and filed stories for McClatchy and the Washington Post. Then he disappeared.

What happens when an impoverished island nation enters into a deal to sell its own citizenship in bulk.

A trip to Enya’s castle in Ireland.

Google and Tesla are spending billions to develop driverless technology. George Hotz used an Acura.

You’ve never heard of her, but somewhere in America, a top-secret investigator known as the Savant is infiltrating online hate groups to take down the most violent men in the country.

When a marketing team found themselves burning out, they shifted their business focus to doing something about it. But if capitalism caused this problem, can capitalism fix it?

An organ transplant recipient cycles across the country to meet the people who gave him his heart.

Walter Tevis, the author of the book upon which the Netflix hit is based, spent his life gambling and drinking in pool halls before turning to chess.

For 10 years, Libre—an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity—has been working to foster conservatism in Hispanic communities. Now, the group is going all-in on Georgia’s Senate runoffs.

As one blockmate after another fell ill, we tried to stay safe and care for one another. It wasn’t always enough.

Yemen on the brink of hell:

In a sense, south Yemen itself offers a grim cautionary tale about the events now unfolding in Taiz and across the country. Until 1990, when the two Yemens merged, South Yemen was a beacon of development and order. Under the British, who ruled the south as a colony until 1967, and the Socialists, who ran it for two decades afterward, South Yemen had much higher literacy rates than the north. Child marriage and other degrading tribal practices came to an end; women entered the work force, and the full facial veil became a rarity. It was only after Ali Abdullah Saleh imposed his writ that things began to change. When the south dared to rebel against him in 1994, Saleh sent bands of jihadis to punish it. The north began treating the south like a slave state, expropriating vast plots of private and public land for northerners, along with the oil profits. Tribal practices returned. Violent jihadism began to grow.

This isn't an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don't want to lie.