American anti-trafficking groups often make impossible-to-verify claims. Now, they’re doing it in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there.

Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman were friends. Until they weren’t.

A study in building spaceships.

“The case of Lisl Auman, who first wrote me from prison three years ago, is so rotten and wrong and shameful that I feel dirty just for knowing about it, and so should you.”

A man heads to Key West in a quest for sobriety.

How a 26-year-old cocktail waitress ended up running a private weekly poker game for some of Hollywood’s highest rollers.

A woman reels in the wake of her mother’s absence.

A chance encounter with a movie star on an airplane.

How a Chinese national, with the help of a suspected spy, disappeared with laptops and hard drives that may have contained sensitive information from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.

When American and Iraqi soldiers were exposed to leftover chemical munitions from Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran, the Pentagon kept silent.

What undercover investigators saw inside a factory farm.

A story of bird and human patterns.

“Redistricting today has become the most insidious practice in American politics—a way, as the opportunistic machinations following the 2010 census make evident, for our elected leaders to entrench themselves in 435 impregnable garrisons from which they can maintain political power while avoiding demographic realities.”

Separated from his older brother at a train, five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan found himself lost in the slums of Calcutta. In his 20s, living in Australia, he began his search for his birth home armed with nothing but hazy memories and Google Earth.

The former chancellor of New York City schools was not, in fact, “a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.”

How the pop psychedelic author helped jumpstart the modern apocalypse movement after an alleged visit from “Quetzal-coatl, a mystical bird-serpent in Mayan myths.”

From 1975-1986, Anthony Edward Dokoupil distributed more than 50 tons of weed in the United States. The operation ruined his family and destroyed his life. Three decades later, his son came looking for answers.

A profile of legendary L.A. crack dealer Freeway Rick Ross, now out of jail and trying to sell everything from weaves to his own biopic, written by a journalist who has known him for decades.

The long, strange trip of the Wikipedia founder, who went from being an Insane Clown Posse fan who owned the “Bomis Babe Report” to a jet-setter married to “the most connected woman in London,” all without turning much of a profit.

The Mennonite women of the Manitoba Colony would awake with blood and semen stains, dried grass in their hair, and tiny bits of rope on their wrists and ankles. Their rapists, armed with a veterinary tranquilizer converted to spray form, were eight young men from their own community.

A profile of documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who last January received “a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key.”

Tyson on his childhood in Brooklyn and the man who changed his life. An excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Undisputed Truth.