Medicine used to be obsessed with eradicating the tiny bugs that live within us. Now we’re beginning to understand all the ways they keep us healthy.

On an artist who’s spent nearly 50 years bending the rules of space and light, and his life’s work, an extinct volcano in Arizona where he has been developing a network of tunnels and underground rooms since 1974.

Team America voyages to Jordan’s King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center to compete against top-seeded China and other squads in challenges based on counter-terrorism scenarios.

Marion and Larry Pollard live in the suburbs. They have eight grandkids and a terrier named Bella. They can also expel demons and save your soul.

How Leo Sharp got busted.

How Hafeez Contractor is creating an alternate India in the sky, where professionsals are “insulated from the chaos that has long hamstrung their homeland.”

How the tech billionaire came to own 87,000 acres, three hotels, a wastewater treatment plant, a cemetery and 380 cats.

“For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero.”

Why 85-year-old Jacques-André Istel established a town (population: 2) on 2,600 acres in the middle of the Arizona desert (but not before becoming a sky diving legend, among other things).

After nearly 15 years in a Peruvian prison, an American woman convicted of aiding a Marxist terrorist group finds parole in Lima full of contradictions.

Peter Zumthor, who recently won the Pritzker Prize after a career of few buildings and mostly modest-in-size projects, on the “architecture of actually making things”

A profile of Zack Snyder, director of Watchmen, Dawn of the Dead, and the upcoming Superman series.

A trip to the Cannabis Cup serves as a backdrop for the story of how the War on Drugs revolutionized the way marijuana is cultivated in America.

75 years ago, Marguerite Perey unearthed an element while working as a technician in Marie Curie’s lab. Her achievement came at a great cost.

Three years ago, Shell spent millions to send a colossal oil rig to drill in the remote seas of the Arctic. But the Arctic had other plans.

Thousands of Korean children were sent abroad beginning in the 1950s. Now, many of them are returning to their country of origin.

How Billy Walters, the world’s most successful gambler, keeps winning.

In the age of citizen journalism, smartphones and streaming video, bearing witness to human rights violations is getting easier. Is it also making justice more complicated?

Daniel Norris lives out of his car. He’s also the #1 pitching prospect for the Toronto Blue Jays.

A man felt wronged by his ex-girlfriend, a video game designer. So he published a 9,425-word online screed with “each component designed to be as damaging to [her] as possible.” It sparked the online fire known as “Gamergate.”

Following two leading figures of the #BlackLivesMatter movement through five months of protests.

How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?

China is securing sub-Saharan Africa’s natural resources at a staggering rate. With the buying spree comes contracts, workers, and of course, politics. (Part 1 of a 6 part series, rest here)

After his untimely death at age 50, prior to the publication of any of his novels, Larsson is posthumously at the center of a publishing empire built on the international success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In a windowless room just outside of New York City, overworked air traffic controllers manage the world’s most-trafficked piece of sky—until all those blips on the screen become too much.