Here I should conjure my sister for you. Here I should describe her, so that you feel her absence as I do—so that you’re made ghostly by it, too. But, though I’m a writer, I’ve never been able to conjure her.

It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

Against all predictions, the Taliban took the Afghan capital in a matter of hours. This is the story of why and what came after, by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.

In 1981, Mauritania became the last country on Earth to abolish slavery. The law had little effect; at least 140,000 people are still enslaved today. Their best hope for freedom is an abolitoinist named Biram Dah Abeid.

Relief pitcher Donnie Moore is best known for giving up a crucial home run during Game 5 the 1986 ALCS. It’s not what led to his suicide a few years later.

Reg Smythe was the greatest British newspaper strip cartoonist of the 20th Century – and second only to Peanuts’ Charles Schulz on a global scale. So why don’t we treat him that way?

Gretchen Molannen was perpetually aroused. She couldn’t work or sleep.

On December 1, the day after this story was published, she killed herself.

Baltimore’s state’s attorney gambled that prosecuting six officers for the death of Freddie Gray would help heal her city. She lost much more than just the case.

Will Lacey was just a baby when doctors diagnosed a rare form of cancer and told his family there was only one end. Nobody then could imagine the journey ahead, from hospital rooms to board rooms, research labs to government offices, a furious race between hope and death.

Manny Ramirez is a deeply frustrating employee, the kind whose talents are so prodigious that he gets away with skipping meetings, falling asleep on the job, and fraternizing with the competition.

David Headley helped plot the Mumbai terror attacks. Now his best friend is on trial for conspiring with him. The prosecution’s key witness: David Headley. The story of an informant trying to save his own life from the witness stand.

How the woman who brought Westboro Baptist to Twitter came to question the church’s beliefs.

The battle to make The Godfather pitted director Francis Ford Coppola against producers including Robert Evans, and the production itself against the real life mob.

On the occasion of Hamid Karzai’s visit to the White House, a fever dream tour of the Afghanistan war through the eyes of the leaders who gave birth to its narrative.

On solitary confinement:

"Two or three hundred years from now people will look back on this lockdown mania like we look back on the burning of witches."

On the mysterious disappearance of a beloved coding legend (and his code) with stops along the way for a short history of programming languages, an ethnography of code-based communities, and an inquiry into what it means to “die young without artifact.”

One night in Newark with Chris Christie and Bruce Springsteen.

“No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”

The Conficker ‘worm’ has replicated itself across tens of millions of computers. Only a few hundred people have the knowledge to recreate how, and no one (except its anonymous maker) fully understands why.

He was an 18 year old Marine bound for Iraq. She was a high school senior in West Virginia. They grew intimate over IM. His dad also started contacting her.  No one was who they claimed to be and it led to a murder.

Night raids by the “Hash Monster” and other perils facing American soldiers at a remote base in the wilderness of the Paktya Province as they attempt to turn over power to the Afghan Army.

After two New Jersey homes were robbed of their silver—only their silver—in the same night, the local police got a call from a detective in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I know the guy who’s doing your burglaries.”