The origin story of the C.I.A.’s covert drone war, which began with the 2004 killing of a Pashtun militant, the result of a secret deal for access to Pakistani airspace.

How companies and large temp agencies benefit from—and tacitly collaborate with—an underworld of labor brokers, known as “raiteros,” who charge workers fees, pushing their pay below minimum wage.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

The Four Seasons restaurant rose to fame as a place to cut deals and be seen. Then its chauvinistic ways – and, specifically, those of its owner – caught up with it.

A profile of Tyler Perry.

Embedded with an Afghan warlord:

This is a local insurgency, often with local causes: a corrupt district governor, predatory police, or abuses by the local militias, the arbakis.

An insider history of the fall of Myspace; from Rupert Murdoch calling Facebook a mere “communications utility” to the disastrous 2006 deal with Google that demanded huge pageviews and ads everywhere, and finally the present day ruins of a titan.

A look at the brave new world of privatized postal services, “optimized to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses.”

On 21st-century prospectors:

Shawn Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear.

A black 16-year-old lights a white, agender 18-year-old’s skirt on fire while riding the bus. Is it a hate crime? And what’s the appropriate punishment?

Rumor had it that a teenager had cut off a man’s penis, and the cops happened to have a murder victim that answered that description. Nothing else lined up.

A profile of Judy Clarke, the publicity-shy anti-death-penalty attorney, who has defended the Unabomber, Susan Smith, and Jared Loughner.

Harsh sentences have given us an aging prison population, and all the medical problems that come with age are beginning to choke the system.

Decades after a young nun was murdered, a group of former Catholic high school students begin to suspect that an abusive priest may have been the culprit.

Horror-rap’s annual festival draws thousands of clown-makeup wearing Juggalos - devotees of Insane Clown Posse - for a weekend devoted to spraying Faygo soda, rioting, and discussions of the occult.

The story of a small town just outside Pittsburgh that has suffered through a half-century of economic decline, racial tension, and endless crime. Despite that trajectory, or perhaps because of it, Aliquippa has also produced an astounding number of NFL players.

The many problems with a common forensic technique called “pattern-matching” — comparisons of bite marks, tool marks, hairs, shoe prints, tire tracks, or fingerprints.

How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific

More Americans rely on Puerto Rico’s grid than on any other public electric utility. How one renegade plant worker led them through the shadows.

How Adam Neumann turned WeWork into a $47 billion business.

It was a place where you could, whatever you needed could to look like, for so many folks who’d been told they could not.

How legends of the American music industry made millions off the work of Solomon Linda, a Zulu tribesman who wrote “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and died a pauper.

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis. The people I grew up with are still feeling the aftershocks.

Three years ago, Seidel began to teach me how to play poker. Why on earth would a professional poker player—the professional poker player—agree to let a random journalist follow him around like an overeager toddler?

Every year eleven million people attend Magh Mela, a Hindu festival on the banks of the Ganges. The temporary infrastructure to support them includes hospitals and power stations, plus a massive surveillance apparatus.