How Russia consistently undermines the U.N. in order to keep a multi-billion dollar monopoly on the sales of helicopters and airplanes.

How a con man named James McCormick sold $38 million worth of phony bomb-detection devices to Iraqi authorities.

A profile of the Megaupload founder, who has started a political party in New Zealand as the U.S. continues to fight for his extradition.

A two-week island experience involving a 70-year-old interloper, his mannequin girlfriend, a couple of dogs and very little else.

How a town of 29,000 on the Hudson River came to be “one of the most dangerous four-mile stretches in the northeastern United States.”

“It’s an old book!” Harper Lee told a mutual friend of ours who’d seen her while I was in Monroeville. “But if someone wants to read it, fine!”

While a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, Austin Tice decided he wanted to become a war photographer. He entered Syria and filed stories for McClatchy and the Washington Post. Then he disappeared.

What happens when an impoverished island nation enters into a deal to sell its own citizenship in bulk.

A trip to Enya’s castle in Ireland.

Google and Tesla are spending billions to develop driverless technology. George Hotz used an Acura.

An organ transplant recipient cycles across the country to meet the people who gave him his heart.

As one blockmate after another fell ill, we tried to stay safe and care for one another. It wasn’t always enough.

A visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships.

Olinka and Drazen are artists, and after some time passed, they did what artists often do: they put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival. It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul, showing the concept to the world. Everywhere they went, from Bloomington to Belgrade, people packed the halls and delivered their own relics of extinguished love: “The Silver Watch” with the pin pulled out at the moment he first said, “I love you.” The wood-handled “Ex Axe” that a woman used to chop her cheating lover’s furniture into tiny bits. Trinkets that had meaning to only two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience that seemed to recognize the same heartache all too well.

“Think about that: Kim has so thoroughly monetized the very act of living that the money she earns from being filmed going about her life constitutes a relatively small sum compared with the one she generates from allowing people to see pictures and cartoon drawings of the life she has already filmed. She has figured out how to spin the mundanity of being herself—something billions of people do every day for free—into a more lucrative business than being the most famous rapper in the world.”

On the current state of the global economy and the inevitable decline of the U.K. and the U.S.:

A decade-long slowdown would accelerate this shift in global wealth and power and would be a grim thing to live through, but from a world-historical perspective it might not be a game-changer: it might just be the non-scenic route to the place we’re going anyway.

Outkast’s Andre Benjamin at 42.

You gotta understand, I’ve only written one check in my life. When I was 17, they still had checkbooks, and my mom taught me how to write a check and do my balance. So I had one check on my balance, and then OutKast took off. I have not paid a bill since. People ask, What does it feel like? As humans, we want attention. We want to be validated. At the same time, it’s strange attention, and a lot of it. If you have an excess of anything, it becomes strange.

A former first-string tackle considers the green zone as a war zone:

Just as football has evolved in accordance with the evolving business ethic of American society, so has it evolved in accordance with the changing strategic assumptions about war. The development (or rebirth) of the T-formation in football coincided almost exactly with the development of a new era of mobility and speed in warfare best exemplified in the Blitzkrieg tactics of the German armies in Europe in 1939-40. The T-formation soon overwhelmed the “Maginot Line” mentality of traditional football, based as it was on rigid lines and massive concentrations of defensive and offensive power.