How moonlight drives life in the ocean.

Sixty journalists cover an ordinary week in an epidemic.

The militarization of local politics in South Africa.

Wolf-trapping school in Alaska.

In 2009, three followers of an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker named James Arthur Ray died in an Arizona sweat lodge. Now, after serving two years in prison for negligent homicide, Ray is trying to get back on the self-help circuit.

In 1916, a pair of 29-year-old women, bored with their lives in Upstate New York, took teaching jobs in a remote area of the Rocky Mountains. This is the story of what they found.

A murder case in Los Angeles, cold since the late ’80s, heats up thanks to breakthroughs in forensic science and leads detectives to “one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.”

In 2005, the prisoner who had set the U.S. penal system record for years in solitary confinement was moved to what’s called “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”—a jail in Colorado built just for him.

When New York built a prison designed to house two men in a single cell, it launched a new experiment in crime control. A look at life inside this prison and in the tiny town surrounding it.

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.

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.

Last fall, when the deadliest blaze in America in a century blew through Northern California, thousands of people—including those in the tiny community of Helltown—were forced to flee. This is the story of four friends who stayed to fight.

In late 2018, Pittsburgh’s Jewish community was mourning the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Then a stranger and his family landed in their midst.

“Successful brand identities in the House and on talk radio have never before relied on such similar skill sets — there has never been so much politics in media, and media in politics.”

In 1980, Richard Pryor doused himself in rum, lit himself, and streaked though the streets or Northridge in a ball of flames. He would go on to live another 25 years.

The bodies in the chalet were found in a secret chamber, arranged radiating out from a point like spokes in a wheel. Some had suffocated, some had been shot. They all were followers of a mysterious prophet, Luc Jouret.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

In anonymous warehouses in Detroit, Goldman Sachs has hoarded a quarter of the world’s supply of aluminum, placing them firmly in control of trading on the London Metal Exchange.

Gaile Owens was a churchgoing mother of two boys in suburban Memphis. Now she’s the first woman sentenced to die in Tennessee in nearly 200 years. The jury never heard her whole story; this is it.

In the midst of a tribal burial, Jim Thorpe’s third wife burst in to remove his body, setting in motion a decades-long battle over the Native American athlete’s final resting place.

In the 1980s, Billy Ray Bates, once dubbed “the Legend,” drank himself out of the NBA and ended up playing in the Philippines. For a few wild years, his legend grew—both on the court and in the bars.

Working from a tiny shop in Chinatown, Sister Ping brought in thousands of Chinese immigrants by boat, bringing in over $40 million. Then one of her ships ran aground.

A profile of Little Richard in the last years of his life, confined to a wheelchair and living in the penthouse suite at the Hilton in downtown Nashville.

In the 1980s some of the world’s most powerful institutions were taken in by stories, begun in Victoria B.C., of a global Satanic underground abducting and abusing thousands of children.

In 2003, the destruction of one particular statue in Baghdad made worldwide headlines and came to be a symbol of western victory in Iraq. But there was so much more to it—or rather, so much less.