For nearly a century, an oak in a German forest has helped lonely people find love—including the mailman who delivers its letters.

Prince had grand plans for his autobiography, but only a few months to live.

Glory isn’t part of the deal when you go to work for the federal government.

For years, Mormon Mommy blogger Natalie Lovin curated a picture-perfect life. Then she left the church—and her husband.

How the #MeToo movement paved the way for a new era of food writing.

Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the classic musical for 2020.

Visas for farmworkers have surged under Trump. But the program has subjected some workers to horrific abuse.

The refugee and author survived, stateless, for seven years. What’s next?

Brutality and resistance on the front lines of Hong Kong’s battle for democracy.

An obituary for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Right-wing militias brace for civil conflict.

Many people dream of building their own home in the country, but one family finds more of a struggle than they bargained for.

Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his show.

It was a fraught, utterly uncharted presidential transition—four years ago, from Obama to Trump. It was a prelude for so much that followed.

More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?

A last-gasp FEMA camp for wildfire survivors tests the government’s obligations to the displaced.

A new pro league is paying teenagers six figures to quit high school for basketball.

The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells.

He came home from Vietnam, wrote the novel that became Full Metal Jacket, was nominated for an Oscar and riding high. Then he got thrown in jail for stockpiling stolen library books, started drinking, cut off his friends and fled to a remote Greek island. He never made it back.

As U.S. troops departed, Baghdad in ruins.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. While on assignment for the New York Times, Anthony Shadid died today in Syria.

“What’s it like to be kidnapped and held for ransom, not as a political prisoner but as an economic one? What’s it like to live in the Ecuadoran jungle for 141 days? What’s it like not to sleep, to be bound in chains, to have your body invaded by living things, to waste away to the point of death?…What’s it like? This is what it’s like.”

The hunt for rare 1933 Double Eagle coins:

The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting the nation’s currency, has been pursuing them for nearly 70 years, through 13 Administrations and 12 different directors. The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.

"Los Angeles is a weird, complicated town for him. It's where all the record labels are, for one thing. And Chancelor Bennett, as he was born, is unsigned. Won't sign. It's maybe the most interesting, improbable music-industry story going right now—a young, obviously gifted rapper, universally hailed as the heir to Kanye and leader of a new generation of Internet-savvy kids who think of Jay Z as a failed tech entrepreneur, now on his fourth year of refusing to sign with a label."

“In this scene, set at a government dacha, they are joined by their American counterparts at the State Department for a daylong picnic that grows increasingly informal, involving drinks, flirtation, a guitar jam and (spoiler) contact between two spies. At times in my new job, I feel like a spy myself, and one with a shaky cover. I don’t have a good answer for how I got here.”