"Opium does not deprive you of your senses. It does not make a madman of you. But drink does. See? Who ever heard of a man committing murder when full of hop. Get him full of whiskey and he might kill his father."

A journey into New York’s turn-of-the-century opium dens to find out who gets hooked and why.

A secret hope of mine, which I now find hilarious: I imagined that once I had a child, I would become a faster writer. Faster, and also better. It’s hard for me to reconstruct the optimistic logic that led me to this hypothesis. I think I honestly believed that if I did not have the option to write badly, I would simply evolve, like that Lamarckian giraffe, into a more efficient creature.

To understand why a 64-year-old man would try and break the land speed record by traveling hundreds of miles per hour, you need to know a little something about his family.

A personal history of Soldier of Fortune magazine and the mercenary-wannabes who read and wrote it.

A dispatch from Donetsk.

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

A profile of Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Published originally in GQ Russia.

“We can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money.”

How a longtime gambling addict and a small band of his cronies manipulated both the game and betting exchanges from a tiny Berlin cafe, going as far as buying ownerships of teams in order to insure their failure.

The controversial history of WI-38, a cell strain created from an aborted fetus “that has arguably helped to save more lives than any other created by researchers.”

How Harper Lee was duped into signing away the rights to To Kill a Mockingbird, which still sells 750,000 copies per year, and how she’s fighting to get them back.

The former Van Halen front man has actually made more money from booze and food than from music.

A small-town coffeeshop owner led a double life as a blogger and podcaster on the topic of “pickup artistry.” Then his identity, and his intimate writings about his experiences with 46 local women, was made public.

For immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, applications for visas, asylum, green cards, and naturalization can take decades. Unless you’re willing to be an informant for the FBI.

During his nearly six years in the Air Force, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant flew hundreds of missions and logged almost 6,000 hours of flight time. He killed or helped kill 1,626 people. And he never left Nevada.

“After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.”

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we.

A visit to the French hideaway of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, who had avoided arrest on murder charges for nearly 20 years.

From our guide to fugitives for Slate.

"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.  A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."

After robbing two video stores with a friend, Rene Lima-Marin was sentenced to almost 100 years in prison. Then, due to a clerical error, he was released 88 years too early.

Darren Sharper was once an NFL star. He was also a serial rapist, one who law enforcement failed to stop.

He went from a viral pop hit to an arrest for conspiracy to murder charges in just under six months. Was Bobby Shmurda “too real” for his label?

An inside look at how an ad agency sells a car in 2015.