“She taught me the tricks of trimming. She taught me to smile when my back ached. She taught me some Bengali words. Sab bhalo. It is all okay.”

Traveling with a sex tourist to the Uzbek city of Tashkent. Excerpted from the forthcoming book If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai.

The Giant Pacific Octopus is, in the words of a Seattle conservationist, a “glamour animal.” It is also tasty. Therein lies the conflict.

“Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I would never believe he had existed.”

John Aldridge fell overboard in the middle of the night, 40 miles from shore, and the Coast Guard was looking in the wrong place. How did he survive?

The FBI couldn’t find Ryan Eugene Mullen. Neither could a trio of private investigators. Only Michelle Gomez knew where to look.

“After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.”

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

At a playground in North Wales, kids are mostly left alone to experiment with fire, jump from great heights and play in a creek. It’s designed to teach the value of taking risks, a lesson many American children have stopped learning.

The perilous routes through which information—video footage, secret documents, radio broadcasts—flow in and out of North Korea through its porous borders with China.

Depending on who you ask, Mohammed Jawad was either 12 or 17 when he was detained. Nobody disputes that he spent seven years at Guantánamo before he was exonerated. The story of a boy who grew up as a detainee.

With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except through the use of more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.

On the emerging student loan bubble.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

A profile Mark Pincus, the founder and C.E.O. of Zynga—the company that created FarmVille, CityVille, and Zynga Poker, the most popular online poker game in the world.

A dispatch from the early days of AIDS:

It is as relentless as leukemia, as contagious as hepatitis, and its cause has eluded researchers for more than two years.

When a CIA operation in Pakistan went bad, leaving three men dead, the episode offered a rare glimpse inside a shadowy world of espionage. It also jeopardized America’s most critical outpost in the war against terrorism.

Boris Yeltsin’s right-hand man tells the inside story of the 1991 coup that killed glasnost:

"That scum!" Boris Yeltsin fumed. "It's a coup. We can't let them get away with it."

FRANCO: “Straight” and “gay” are fairly recent phenomena. One of the things the great book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940 is about is the way those labels have changed behavior. Between World War I and World War II, straight guys could have sex with other guys and still be perceived as straight as long as they acted masculine. Whether you were considered a “fairy” or a “queer” back then wasn’t based on sexual acts so much as outward behavior. Into the 1950s, 1960s and so on, the straight and gay thing came up based on your sexual partner. Because of those labels, you do it once and you’re gay, so you get fewer guys who are kind of in the middle zone. It sounds as though I’m advocating for an ambiguous zone or something, but I’m just interested in the way perception changes behavior.

A profile of Rupert Murdoch from 1995, as he fought monopoly charges in the U.S. and U.K. and prepared to expand his empire into China.

Murdoch is a pirate; he will cunningly circumvent rules, and sometimes principles, to get his way, as his recent adventures in China demonstrate.

What happened to Wesley Autrey after he jumped in front of a New York City subway train to save a man’s life.

A profile of David Yerushalmi, the little-known Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn leading the campaign casting Islamic law as the greatest threat to American freedom since the cold war.

In 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and held the entire American diplomatic mission hostage for fifteen months. Twenty-five years later, the students reflected on their actions, many with regret.

From his arrival in New York as a penniless 22-year-old Dutch stowaway through years of obscurity until emerging as a major artist in his 50s.

A charismatic entrepreneur, an ex-con turned devout Christian, and the politicians who championed them.

The story of a $36 billion Ponzi scheme in Minnesota.

Relying on programmers to map real world social connections is like “hiring a Mormon bartender” and other observations on why our strange urge to document the nodes of friendship is doomed.