The complicated case of Brigitte Harris, who, after years of abuse, accidentally killed her father by cutting off his penis.

“Being Justin Bieber means having an endless number of T-shirts to destroy.” A profile of the pop star just after his 18th birthday.

The life of a modern-day indentured servant involves a truck, mountains of debt, and moving goods for America’s biggest retailers.

Booker winner Howard Jacobson on the bumper crop of sex worker memoirs and what they say about our understanding of paid sex.

How a night of drunken mischief led to the death of a rare endangered fish and a rare prosecution.

A profile of Erik Prince, then the CEO of America’s largest and most controversial mercenary force, Blackwater, who happened to be a C.I.A. agent.

After decades of mismanaging its nuclear waste, the US Department of Energy wrestles with its toxic legacy.

The Haqqani family, an organized crime militia dubbed the “Sopranos of the Afghanistan war,” will almost surely outlast the U.S. occupation and thus seize tremendous power after the U.S. exits.

A profile of 22-year-old hacker George Hotz, who in 2007 became the first person to successfully unlock the iPhone. A few years later, he became the first person to successfully hack the Playstation 3. And, shortly thereafter, he became the first person to get sued by Sony for it.

More migrants than ever are crossing the Colombia-Panama border to reach the U.S. Five days inside the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous journeys in the world.

An engineering team races to create a next-generation computer.

The first installment of The Soul of a New Machine.

When Conan O’Brien left NBC, he agreed to stay off TV for months and stay quiet about the network and its executives. The agreement contained no mention of social media, however. On the origins of a digital renaissance.

The American medical establishment has gone to extraordinary lengths—some of which read like conspiracy theory—to discredit the notion (and its most visible promoter, Dr. Atkins) that carbohydrates, not fat, are the cause of obesity. It looks like they were wrong.

A profile of Travis Kalanick, who resigned from the ride the ride-hailing company he built after leading it to the brink of implosion.

The story of a young man from rural Ghana who bought a pair of secret camera glasses and got himself smuggled across the Sahara, to film crime and exploitation along the way.

Inside the world of online dating:

If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony.

In 1974,  a pair of four-year-old cousins wandered into the jungle near India’s border with Myanmar. The boy was found five days later, temporarily incapable of speech. The girl was gone. For decades, stories echoed through villages of a “wild-looking woman,” sometimes striding beside a tiger. Thirty-eight years later, she returned.

On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.

The story of Max Factor, a Polish immigrant who revoltuionized Hollywood cosmetics starting in the 1920s, and his “Beauty Calibrator” machine.

The profile of a 34-year-old woman named Charity Johnson who tricked people all over the country into believing she was still in high school.

In the 1970s, Chile was on the verge of developing sophisticated technology to monitor its economy. Then America intervened.

Thousands of new warehouse jobs were supposed to help lift a struggling British economy. Instead, employees started equating the work with “being in a slave camp.”

On the lesbian separatists of the 1970s, who “created a shadow society devoted to living in an alternate, penisless reality.”

On Finland, the country most afraid of Russia.

The life of the former defensive tackle, who was paralyzed during a kickoff return.