The ads are everywhere. You can learn to serve like Serena Williams or write like Margaret Atwood. But what MasterClass really delivers is something altogether different.

A trip to Carbohydrate Camelot.

“These documents show how Palantir applies Silicon Valley’s playbook to domestic law enforcement. New users are welcomed with discounted hardware and federal grants, sharing their own data in return for access to others’. When enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.”

The rise and fall of former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson.

On Tse Chi Lop, “the Jeff Bezos of the drug trade” and ringleader of a $21-billion crime syndicate.

Their community forged by industry, residents of Badin, North Carolina confront the long shadow of racism and pollution.

Dead construction workers, a corrupt political family, and the “impossibly lucrative casino” on the island of Saipan where Chinese gamblers can game on U.S. soil.

Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him.

The world’s largest jewelry retailer was a cesspool of harassment and unfair treatment of women who worked there.

When a marketing team found themselves burning out, they shifted their business focus to doing something about it. But if capitalism caused this problem, can capitalism fix it?

The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the 101st Airborne Division, an execution of captured Iraqi prisoners, and how far up the chain of command responsibility lies.

The Federal Trade Commission has brought more than 60 cases related to data security against businesses. Only one has refused to settle.

An alleged rape and one woman’s futile quest for justice in modern China.

In just the past few years, one union has organized close to 10,000 Florida adjuncts, in what is one of the most remarkable and little-noticed large scale labor campaigns in the country.

In the ’90s, a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie exposed an AIDS epidemic in rural China and the ensuing government cover-up. Forced to leave, she’s now 85 and living alone in New York.

An essay on Alcor – “the Arizona cryonics company that has put the body of Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams in cryogenic suspension, in the hope he may one day rise again” – and the desire to live forever.

A profile of New York Times Company CEO Mark Thompson.

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000, it would be small for a Triple A baseball franchise.

A Denver businessman’s revolutionary green energy company turned out to be nothing but a Ponzi scheme built to fund a lifestyle of booze-soaked hotel orgies with flown-in prostitutes.

A profile of new Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard, who in another life was a touring musician and hated Ticketmaster just like everyone else.

A young dealer goes on the lam after selling multiple masterpieces to several buyers simultaneously.

How the the rush to direct-selling platforms like OnlyFans could change the adult industry forever.

How did a tenure-track professor wind up selling his plasma? A story about debt.

On the campaign trail in the most Republican congressional district in America.

The U.N.’s role in creating an epidemic in Haiti.