On January 18, 1990, Mayor Marion Barry was caught smoking crack at D.C.’s Vista Hotel. The author was one of the first reporters on the scene. He interviewed guests, staff, anyone he could find. Then he got a room, called his regular strawbery, and got high himself.

Before he died, Sun Myung Moon, cult father to massive Unification Church (known better as the Moonies), sent 14 Japanese “national messiahs” deep into the Paraguayan jungle to build an utopian “ideal city.” Thirteen years later, the author catches a trading boat down river in search of their hidden town.

Shortly before leaving Goldman Sachs, Sergey Aleynikov downloaded around 32mb of source code from their high-frequency stock-trading system. Even as he was sent away for an eight year bid in federal prison, no one seemed to fully understand exactly what he did.

“In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? “

After acting erratically and trying to skip out on a dinner bill, she was detained briefly in Malibu before being released in the middle of the night. Twenty-four years old and in an unfamiliar area, she had no car, no phone, and no wallet. A year later, her body was found in a nearby canyon. On the search for answers.

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, ''That was that.'' It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality.

All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.

“What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life.”

In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him—for 438 days.

Nearly 20 years ago in a remote California town, a 16-year-old named Karen Mitchell disappeared. The case went cold, but last month local law enforcement started looking at it again after the arrest of a former resident: Robert Durst.

“What’s it like to be kidnapped and held for ransom, not as a political prisoner but as an economic one? What’s it like to live in the Ecuadoran jungle for 141 days? What’s it like not to sleep, to be bound in chains, to have your body invaded by living things, to waste away to the point of death?…What’s it like? This is what it’s like.”

Over four months, a methane well in southern California’s Aliso Canyon leaked Lebanon’s equivalent of yearly emissions into the atmosphere. No one knows what the long-term effects will be.

It started as simple teenage rebellion but ended up tearing Syria apart, setting in motion events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world. The boys behind the graffiti would become unlikely revolutionaries and reluctant refugees. Not all of them would survive the upheaval they helped unleash.

“A unicorn, a monster, a phoenix, a machine, a heavyweight fighter, an astronaut, a superhero, a thoroughbred, a home-run hitter, a waitress juggling ‘16 entrees, 42 starters, 16 desserts,’ a jazz virtuoso, LeBron James, Magellan, Snuffleupagus. The actress Laurie Metcalf has been compared to all of these things.”

“Tiffany Haddish may, in fact, be too good at being Tiffany Haddish. Too good at seeming like one of your friends who became famous. At times, she treats her new fame like she is on a group text with the world.”

Published across three consecutive issues and later adapted into the book (and mini-series) Generation Kill, the story of bullets, bombs and a Marine platoon at war in Iraq.

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.

Clint Lorance had been in charge of his platoon for only three days when he ordered his men to kill three Afghans stopped on a dirt road. A second-degree murder conviction and pardon followed. Today, Lorance is hailed as a hero by President Trump. His troops have suffered a very different fate.