Where Big Tech goes to ask deep questions.

The extraordinary “rescue” of a fallen California firefighter.

The view of a life from cruising altitude.

What’s behind the explosion of British potato chip flavors?

On the plight of indigenous suicide in Alaska.

How the bestselling sci-fi author builds her stories.

A Kickstarter for a Kevlar backpack goes awry leading to a federal investigation.

Forty-five days of avoiding the coronavirus.

One restaurant’s struggle to weather the pandemic.

On the epidemic of deaths in jails.

A trip into the Arctic.

How the FBI manufactures phony crimes to arrest so-called terrorists.

Inside Trump’s battles with U.S. intelligence agencies.

Fear, control, and manipulation at Yoga to the People.

On the birth of a progressive protest movement under President Trump.

The author on his relationship with money.

Millions of hearts fail each year. Why can’t we replace them?

A diary of the author’s visit to Palestine.

The story of Theranos.

Investigating the unsolved murder of Malcolm X’s grandson.

An investigation into slavery in Mauritania:

An estimated 10% to 20% of Mauritania’s 3.4 million people are enslaved — in “real slavery,” according to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Gulnara Shahinian. If that’s not unbelievable enough, consider that Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery. That happened in 1981, nearly 120 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. It wasn’t until five years ago, in 2007, that Mauritania passed a law that criminalized the act of owning another person. So far, only one case has been successfully prosecuted.

The making of the “five-thousand-page, five-volume book, known formally as the Dictionary of American Regional English and colloquially just as DARE”:

What joking names do you have for an alarm clock? For a toothpick? For a container for kitchen scraps? Or an indoor toilet? Or women’s underwear? When a woman divides her hair into three strands and twists them together, you say she is_____her hair? What words do you have to describe people’s legs if they’re noticeably bent, or uneven, or not right? What do you call the mark on the skin where somebody has sucked it hard and brought blood to the surface?

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.