The largest crowdfunding site in the world puts up a mirror to who we are and what matters most to us. Try not to look away.

How Aja Newman’s trip to the emergency room uncovered the abusive behavior of “rock star” physician David Newman, who ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual abuse against his patients.

Antonio Carrion was headed for the NFL when the voices started and he drifted away. Then his estranged mother finished her time for robbery and saved him from a system that’s unkind to the mentally ill.

Katrina’s floodwaters had knocked out the power. Evacuation of the sickest patients seemed impossible. So the doctors at Memorial did what they thought was right, even if they knew it was a crime.

Sometimes the Study Area seemed like a tumor that had burst on the side of capitalism. Other times it seemed like something ancient and sensible: people building dwellings, then improving them.

A profile of Little Richard in the last years of his life, confined to a wheelchair and living in the penthouse suite at the Hilton in downtown Nashville.

Banned in Russia and cut by Condé Nast from the GQ website, this story (presented in full) details the intrigue behind the Moscow apartment bombings, blamed on Chechens, that allowed Putin to rapidly ascend to power.

In the 1980s some of the world’s most powerful institutions were taken in by stories, begun in Victoria B.C., of a global Satanic underground abducting and abusing thousands of children.

In staying, I was not only denying myself the chance at true happiness, but I was keeping him from having it, too. It was that realization—that I was preventing my husband from having the life he deserved—that ultimately outweighed the fears I had about leaving.

Twenty-five years ago this month, “superpredator” was coined in The Weekly Standard. Media spread the term like wildfire, creating repercussions on policy and culture we are still reckoning with today.

The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.

Chicago’s predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting, but it couldn’t determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime.

Prison Doctor David Ross was powerless in the role of bedside bystander as he tended to ten hunger strikers who died during the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike. Five years later, he killed himself.

An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.

"What’s it like to be giving birth at home, and see blood pooling between your legs, and look up at the ashen faces of a birth attendant, a midwife, a spouse? What’s it like to feel the earth tremble and see the roof and walls of your home or school fall towards you? More to the point, in terms of survival: what happens next? It depends. Not just on the severity of the injury, but on who and where you are."

‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.

The life and mysterious death of dissident Bulgarian writer and radio journalist Georgi Markov.

How the Ebola virus works.

The story of one of the 74,000 children who come to this country each year alone and undocumented.

Inside the stronghold of Commander Pigeon, “collector of lost and exiled men.”

How Curtis Duffy overcame his parents’ murder-suicide to become one of the nation’s great chefs.

The murder of an Olympic champion and the autopsy that shook a city.

The hunt for a secretive network of British men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds.

Memories of living with the writer Andrew Lytle late in his life.