How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?

The where-are-they-now stories of MC Ren, DJ Scatch, Sir Jinx, Kid Disaster, Candyman, and everyone else on the cover of 1987’s N.W.A. and the Posse.

On his 80th birthday; how Archie Leach, “the Bristol-born son of a part-Jewish suit presser,” became the greatest leading man of his generation.

The life of Adolf Tolkachev, Soviet dissident and CIA spy.

After a non-profit’s documentary about a central African despot became the most viral video of all time, the founder had a nude nervous breakdown on the streets of San Diego. Now he’s back.

Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

Obinwanne Okeke was supposed to be a rags-to-riches Nigerian success story, was even featured on the cover of Forbes. Then the feds followed the money.

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.

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.

A profile of Killer Mike, the self-described “gangsta rap suburban father” whose speech about Ferguson went viral last fall.