A profile of Phoenix Jones, real-life superhero.

A clandestine meeting between Western journalists and Hezbollah fighters in a Beirut strip mall.

How a surgical innovation allowed Dallas Weins to find a new face.

On race and risk in American culture.

A youth wasted on pro-level ultimate frisbee.

The making of the “five-thousand-page, five-volume book, known formally as the Dictionary of American Regional English and colloquially just as DARE”:

What joking names do you have for an alarm clock? For a toothpick? For a container for kitchen scraps? Or an indoor toilet? Or women’s underwear? When a woman divides her hair into three strands and twists them together, you say she is_____her hair? What words do you have to describe people’s legs if they’re noticeably bent, or uneven, or not right? What do you call the mark on the skin where somebody has sucked it hard and brought blood to the surface?

The complicated case of Michelle Kosilek, a murderer fighting for sexual reassignment surgery.

The disappearance of a legendary scavenger could have dire consequences for a swelling human population.

On the surprising radicalism of library music – “music that has been composed and recorded for commercial purposes.”

A UVA alum goes back for the first rush week since the Rolling Stone story.

The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.

How a tiny protest at the University of Nebraska turned into a proxy war for the future of campus politics.

The platform’s entertainment for children is weirder—and more globalized—than adults could have expected.

The long struggle for workers’ rights at poultry plants is now more urgent than ever

Why a Nova Scotia community is still searching for the killer of a beloved farmer thirty years later.

A recent history of ‘bupe’ Suboxone film, which is described as a miracle cure for opiate addiction but flows freely from for-profit clinics to dealers and inmates, sometimes melted into the pages of smuggled Bibles.

A visit to the French hideaway of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, who had avoided arrest on murder charges for nearly 20 years.

From our guide to fugitives for Slate.

He went from a viral pop hit to an arrest for conspiracy to murder charges in just under six months. Was Bobby Shmurda “too real” for his label?

“I don’t think [the news media] has ever had a good handle on a political moment. It’s not designed for that. It’s designed for engagement.”

For years, homosexuals have, for the most part, been politically apathetic. Rarely did a candidate stir their enthusiasm; when homosexuals did vote, many of the more affluent ones tended to go Republican. But now the gay and lesbian community appears to be united for the first time in a Presidential race behind a single candidate -- Bill Clinton. And the money is pouring into the Clinton campaign -- $2 million so far from identifiably gay sources, according to Democratic Party estimates. "The gay community is the new Jewish community," says Rahm Emanuel, the Clinton campaign's national finance director. "It's highly politicized, with fundamental health and civil rights concerns. And it contributes money. All that makes for a potent political force, indeed."

What IARPA's project calls for is the deployment of spy resources against an entire language. Where you or I might parse a sentence, this project wants to parse, say, all the pages in Farsi on the Internet looking for hidden levers into the consciousness of a people.

“For much of my life, there was something about my mother I felt almost allergic to. As she approached death, for the first time I found I didn’t merely love her, I actually liked her.”

From Hong Kong to Bangkok to the Golden Triangle, the author searches for something everyone says no longer exists: an opium den.

Searching for the line between courage and humility on an expedition to Cirque of the Unclimbables, a remote ring of perfect rock-climbing mountains in Canada.