Full six-part series on the rise and fall of Viktor Bout, the most notorious arms dealer of the modern era.

A brief history of churchyards, cemeteries, and the ghosts that haunt them.

How the #MeToo movement paved the way for a new era of food writing.

The film is a rare portrayal of black people in our fullness—angry and frightened and hurt, euphoric and loving and free.

A minute-by-minute account of one of the worst sailing disasters in American history.

How climate change is altering food in Greenland.

Dr. Drew has turned addiction television into a mini-empire, offering treatment and cameras to celebrities who have fallen far enough to take the bait.  His motivations, he insists, are pure:

Whether the doctor purposefully cultivates his celebrity stature for noble means or wittingly invites it because he himself likes being in the spotlight, he is operating on the assumption that his empathetic brand of TV will breed empathy instead of the more likely outcome, that it will just breed more TV.

Then there’s Mark Kostabi, the former New York gossip column fixture and self-professed “con artist” who everybody remembers but nobody talks about. Christie’s and Sotheby’s have no comment. Neither does the MoMA, the Guggenheim, or the Met, despite the curious fact that they all have Kostabis in their permanent collections. As for quotes from some highfalutin critics expounding on the semiotics of cone hats, cash registers, and the Sony Walkman in Kostabi’s work? Not a chance.

How the bulk of the cocaine entering the U.S. ends up cut with a cattle dewormer.

“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. I mean really, no fear!”

The disappearance of the mysterious “Pakistani asset” that helped the CIA zero in on Bin Laden.

The first article in a two-part history of the Educational Testing Service, the institution behind the SAT.

Investigating a pilot’s choice and the death of 217 people.

Zaranj: the bloody border of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The main characteristic of Diane was courage.”

How the Library of Congress failed to adapt to the 21st century.

On the evolving design and industrialization of the American outdoors.

Analysis of the trial from future Supreme Court justice.

How one of the greatest mathematicians in the world thinks.

A tale of British gangsters who were determined to be famous.

With the suburb’s teens a year after the death of Michael Brown.

On the plight of the baobab tree.

On the cutthroat dealings of the porta-potty business.

John Singleton at the release of Boyz n the Hood.

According to the movie version, they died side by side, guns blazing, in the crosshairs of half a Bolivian regiment. It’s a great Hollywood ending that happens to be true, mostly: they left America… then died in Bolivia. What Hollywood didn’t know is that Butch and Sundance escaped.