“If you take the chance, sometimes you’ll find something so magnificent that it was worth dying for, and sometimes you’ll find nothing and have a horrible night. To go deeper with it, that’s the most interesting challenge.”

“I want to tell a different story, the more common yet strangely hidden one, which is that I don’t feel guilty and tortured about my abortion. Or rather, my abortions. There, I said it.”

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

Bruce Cawsey Waite has no home, no office, and wears a dead man’s suit.

In 1980, Richard Pryor doused himself in rum, lit himself, and streaked though the streets or Northridge in a ball of flames. He would go on to live another 25 years.

The outgoing treasury secretary on his financial crisis regrets, putting policy before politics, and whether Washington will ever be able to strike a grand bargain.

“The mythical image of Malick that has been built up over the last 30-odd years is, in essence, a creation of the same media corps with whom the filmmaker himself has continually chosen not to engage.”

How the case of a poisoned college student in China, cold for 18 years, has suddenly turned into “what may be the largest amateur online manhunt in history.”

An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”

“As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late.”

The controversial history of WI-38, a cell strain created from an aborted fetus “that has arguably helped to save more lives than any other created by researchers.”

How the heir to a horse racing empire became an informant on the Zetas cartel as they pushed their money laundering operations into the lucrative quarter horse trade.

The men and the women of the transactional-love economy. “A thing you should know is that there are very few people to root for in this story.”

“The concussion that led Borland to retire came on a routine play, and that’s precisely his point.”

A profile of Judy Clarke, who takes on the most heinous, notorious defendants in America, trying to save them from the death penalty. Until Dzokhar Tsarnaev, she usually succeeded.

One Marine battalion has had four members kill themselves in just the last year. The soldiers have jury-rigged a system of Facebook notifications and Google spreadsheets to try to stop it.

Australian Rocky Perone, age 21, made his minor league baseball debut with a stolen base in 1974. Except he wasn’t Australian, wasn’t named Rocky Perone and most definitely wasn’t 21.

Five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed on American soil between 1981 and 1990. The prime suspects? Members of the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, a group of former military commanders from South Vietnam.

On the battle between Google, Apple, Uber, and Tesla to own the driverless car market, which could be worth more than $30 billion a year.

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.”

“It looks as though someone has slapped three pounds of wet clay onto his face, where it clings, burying the boy inside. But Sam, the boy behind the mask, peers out from the right eye. It is clear, perfectly formed and a deep, penetrating brown.”

On a small section of land wedged between Egypt and Sudan called Bir Tawil and the American who tried to claim it for himself.

Philanthropist and private equity mogul David Rubenstein is lauded for his patriotic donations, including half the cost of repairing the Washington Monument. He also helped save a controversial tax break billionaires love.