The world’s fastest growing economy isn’t China; it’s the “unheralded alternative economic universe of System D” aka the $10 trillion global black market.

It was just a kayaking trip. Then it upended their lives.

A profile of Edna Buchanan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Miami Herald during its heyday.

A mid-boom critique of New York City’s high-priced, mostly glass condo buildings.

Joe Exotic bred lions, tigers, and ligers at his roadside zoo. He was a modern Barnum who found an equally extraordinary nemesis.

One year ago the journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never walked out. This is what happened.

On surfer girls in Maui; the story that led to the film Blue Crush.

Caveh Zahedi’s abject, self-defeating, ethically questionable, maddeningly original approach to documentary.

How a Sacramento Kings executive stole more than $13 million from the team—and almost got away with it.

Three days in the creative wilderness with Francis Farewell Starlite, the reclusive muse to Kanye West, Bon Iver and Drake.

Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his show.

The dark secret life of The Great Zucchini, Washington D.C.’s most sought after children’s birthday party entertainer.

How phone phreakers, many of them blind, opened up Ma Bell to unlimited free international calling using a technical manual and a toy organ.

As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, New York’s schools remain separate and unequal.

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.

On the road with the band:

Axl Rose is carrying on like an Apache. He stormed into his home state for a concert and compared the fans there to prisoners at Auschwitz. He showed up two hours late for a New York show and launched into a tirade against his record company and various other institutions, including this magazine. He steamrolled into St. Louis, and before he left town, a riot had broken out. During an encore in Salt Lake City, he got ticked off because the Mormons weren't rocking and said, "I'll get out of here before I put anybody else to sleep." Then he did.

Note From the Editors: As we were reporting this story, Newsweek Media Group fired Newsweek Editor Bob Roe, Executive Editor Ken Li and Senior Politics Reporter Celeste Katz for doing their jobs. Reporters Josh Keefe and Josh Saul were targeted for firing before an editor persuaded the company to reverse its decision. As we continued working on the story, we were asked to take part in a review process, which, we ultimately learned, involved egregious breaches of confidentiality and journalism ethics.

Saul is a Longform contributing editor.

The hunt for a secretive network of British men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

The former editor of the New York Observer, profiled.

When the best three months of your life are “called three of the uglier months in the recent history of the National Football League.”

Michael Quinn took on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and lost.

The afterlife of 486 frames of Kodachrome II 8mm film shot by Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder.

A father’s life, one year after the death of his three daughters in a fire.