There are just a handful of people using iron lungs in the U.S. And the machines they rely on to live are wearing out.

What the journey of swifts, who spend all their time in the sky, tell us about the future.

How a drifter from Milwaukee became the chief executioner of the Cuban Revolution—and a test case for U.S. civil rights.

An orgy of free song-sharing seems to be exactly the kind of thing that the horrified labels would quickly clamp down on. But they appear to be starting to accept that their fortunes rest with the geeks. Or at least they’re trying to talk a good game. “I’m not part of the past—I’m part of the future,” says Lucian Grainge, chair and CEO of the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group. “There’s a new philosophy, a new way of thinking.”

On the hundreds of corpses that go unindentified every year along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Exploring the relationship between cats and the Internet in Japan.

Meet Alan Chambers, former leader of Exodus International–a “pray the gay away” ministry.

The author dives to the wreck of the Mohawk, where his uncle died in 1935.

The stories of the 109 black men who have played quarterback in the NFL, from Fritz Pollard to Russell Wilson.

Spending time with the residents of K6G, the only gay wing in the entire American penal system.

It isn’t easy to find out the truth about the benefits of male circumcision.

The frenzied few days before the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

A profile of the author on the eve on his debut novel, The Water Dancer.

Forty-five years ago, Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon. It made him one of the most famous people in the world. And it has haunted the rest of his life.

How the singer became the target of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ early, racially-motivated war on drugs. </br></br>

Excerpted from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

He was an itinerant preacher who claimed god have revealed him to be the one true prophet. He kidnapped Elizabeth Smart  and lived with her in a makeshift camp for years. She was hard to find; not because he was sly, but because Utah is full of prophets with multiple young wives.

The first living ex-pope in 600 years watches as the successor he enabled dismantles his legacy.

“My mother kept scrapbooks of everything any of her children did all their lives, and among my scrapbooks are newspapers that I wrote on the typewriter at the age of six, The Hersey Family News, with ads offering my older brothers for various kinds of hard labor at very low wages.”

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba; the U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes. The truth is more complicated.

Sexual harassment. Hate speech. Employee walkouts. The Silicon Valley giant is trapped in a war against itself. And there’s no end in sight.

The Piano Man of Yarmouk fled the ruins of Damascus to a life of criss-crossing Germany playing songs about his old neighborhood to huge crowds. Because of refugee law, he is paid nothing.

ISIS vs. the Kurds.

“From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades.”

An interview with Rachel Dolezal.