She’s 80 now, working 13 hour days, and still won’t take so much as a reporter’s hand to cross the stream.

On Amaris Tyynismaa, the 14-year-old star runner who has Tourette’s.

A profile.

Last year, a group of young Romanians stole millions of euros worth of art from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. They had previously only robbed homes and thought the artwork would be easy to sell. It was not. So they secreted it back home, where, in an effort to save her son, the leader’s mother burned it.

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.

Last summer, when she thought nobody was looking, Mary Bale put a cat in the trash. The act was caught on video, and Bale was quickly tried and convicted online. The aftermath of a viral crime.

It was the worst AIDS crisis in years—until it wasn’t.

Tracking down the very best in Grateful Dead concert concessions.

Doing mushrooms in space.

With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports.

It was the middle of the day in the steamy Philippine jungle and the sun was merciless. Director Francis Ford Coppola, dressed in rumpled white Mao pajamas, was slowly making his way upriver in a motor launch.

In a speech that’s getting a bit of flak for recycling some of his past lines, the stage- and screenwriter says it’s okay to make mistakes along the way:

And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You're a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You're barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they're a-coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

Chris Earnshaw began taking photographs of Washington, D.C. more than 40 years ago. By the time he paid a visit to a museum to tout his work, he had in his possession—in plastic bags and filing drawers—3,000 Polaroids of a city long gone.

Her disclosure of classified documents in 2010 ushered in the age of leaks. Now, freed from prison, she talks about why she did it—and the isolation that followed.

Nearly every American soldier injured in Iraq or Afghanistan is treated—for a few days at least—at a single hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

The comedian on his show business bucket list, Donald Sterling, and whether he ever feels guilty for being funny.

Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law was passed to protect kids from meth labs. But is the prosecution of about 60 mothers – and the definition of “child” extended to “unborn child” – pushing its boundaries too far?

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.

An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to Kanye West to Migos.

One cyclist rides west, another rides east. They meet on an empty stretch of road in a Kazakh desert.

Noorullah Aminya was once a valuable ally to the American military. Then, with the Taliban going after his family, he attempted to defect and spent three years in federal detention. To be granted asylum, he needed to convince a judge that the Taliban rule Afghanistan in full. Which would mean America has lost the war.

When Larycia Hawkins, the first black woman to receive tenure at Wheaton College, made a symbolic gesture of support for Muslims, the evangelical college became divided over what intellectual freedom on its campus really meant.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

In 1939, acting on a tip and clues from The Iliad, archaeologists unearthed King Nestor’s palace on Pylos. Recently, another discovery in Pylos, the grave of an even earlier soldier, could change our entire understanding of how western civilization developed.