For almost 20 years, Greg Torti has lived the life of a convicted sex offender—carrying a blue ID card with him at all times, avoiding schools and parks, living on the outskirts of town. It’s a just punishment for the crime, he says. It’s just that he didn’t commit it.

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.

The Conficker ‘worm’ has replicated itself across tens of millions of computers. Only a few hundred people have the knowledge to recreate how, and no one (except its anonymous maker) fully understands why.

After two New Jersey homes were robbed of their silver—only their silver—in the same night, the local police got a call from a detective in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I know the guy who’s doing your burglaries.”

A profile of Viktor Bout, believed to be the largest arms trafficker in the world. A Russian who bought his first cargo planes at age 25, Bout has been in the news recently after being arrested in Thailand.

The life and times of Myrtis Dightman, who broke the color barrier in professional rodeo and became one of the best bull riders who ever lived.

A decade ago, scientists worried the lion could go extinct in Kenya by 2020. But today the area’s lion population is thriving thanks to an extraordinary group.

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

The incentives for and ethics of writing other people’s books.

A clinical test is underway to evaluate MDMA—ecstasy—as a treatment for PTSD.

Searching for the source of British Columbia’s grim flotsam.

Things might have been very different for the Chicago White Sox

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

Amazon’s internal injury records expose the true toll of its relentless drive for speed.

The 20 soldiers in Second Platoon try in vain to hold down a strategic outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, “among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S. forces.”

A profile of Rick Santorum published early in his final campaign for the U.S. Senate, a race widely considered a stepping stone to the White House before he lost.

In 1998, a cop named Jon Aujay went for a run in the desert. He never came back. The department decided it was suicide, but that is not the only theory.

In nine hours, Guinea-Bissau’s President and military leader were assassinated in separate incidents. Their dealings had turned the country into the runway of choice for drug smugglers and Hezbollah.

On the visionary architecture and disturbing goals of Yearning for Zion, the utopian experiment undertaken in rural Texas by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

The holdings of the Seattle Art Museum are historically male-dominated. When Matthew Offenbacher won a prize for his own art, he decided to use it to beef up their queer and female holdings.

For thousands of years, sailors in the Marshall Islands have navigated vast distances of open ocean without instruments. Almost nobody on Earth understands how they do it. And soon, the few people who do will be gone.

For those who suffer from environmental illnesses, the town of Snowflake is an escape from a modern world full of allergens: fragrances, gluten, wifi.

By choice, for less than $2 an hour, the female inmate firefighters of California work their bodies to the breaking point. Sometimes they even risk their lives.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., known as the Golden State Killer, is alleged to have murdered 13 people in California during the 1970s and 1980s. He also raped 50 women. He’ll stand trial for the murders only.