Hua Qu is fighting to save her husband — one of at least seven U.S. captives in the Islamic Republic being used as pawns in a nearly 40-year secret history of hostage taking.

The anatomy of a 1930 epidemic that wasn’t:

Was parrot fever really something to worry about? Reading the newspaper, it was hard to say. “not contagious in man,” the Times announced. “Highly contagious,” the Washington Post said. Who knew? Nobody had ever heard of it before. It lurked in American homes. It came from afar. It was invisible. It might kill you. It made a very good story. In the late hours of January 8th, editors at the Los Angeles Times decided to put it on the front page: “two women and man in Annapolis believed to have 'parrot fever.'"

Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He's renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.

But the more that I tried to remind myself of the various ways in which I did, in fact, seem to have a body that was moving, with a heart that pumped blood, the more agitated I became. Being dead butted up against the so-called evidence of being alive, and so I grew to avoid that evidence because proof was not a comfort; instead, it pointed to my insanity.

The author of I Know What You Did Last Summer investigates her own daughter’s unsolved murder.

Inside the collapse of TelexFree, an alleged $1 billion pyramid scheme that duped investors worldwide.

How the self-proclaimed “inventor of all things streaming” went from dot-com millionaire to crime ring accomplice.

A Liberian road trip with the creator of MTV, Ralph Reed and a reformed cannibal named General Butt Naked.

A profile of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The growth of an immersive universe that is “part game and part soap opera and part shadow economy.”

In a Turkish hotel, veterans of the Libyan Revolution meet with their fractured Syrian counterparts to transfer know-how and heavy weaponry.

An analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Cotton Tenants, the original manuscript.

The story of a high school quarterback’s descent into madness, and its tragic end.

A letter to his unborn son about the wonders of being an only child.

A profile of 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, the newly crowned Miss America.

An oral history of James Brown, from Macon to the top.

On Sam Jain and Daniel Sundin, the fugitive kings of scareware.

On the tangled early careers of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr and Jeffrey Eugenides.

The Starbucks-fueled saga of how Jim Romenesko, beloved journalism blogger, took an early retirement.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

A tech reporter tells the story of his ruined digital life.

The truncated, violent lives of Richard Matt and David Sweat before their prison escape.

Why “the legal equivalent of outer space” continues to exist, fifteen years after 9/11.

Ten stories on guns, ranging from competitive shooting, to girl gangs in Chicago, to the sisters and mothers of mass shooting victims.

Five of the sixteen women speak.