Before ending up in Rikers, Jeremy Wilson — if that’s his real name — had portrayed himself as a Scottish-born DJ, a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer, a professor at MIT, an Apple executive, a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and an Irish mobster. Among others.

On the Susan B. Anthony List, the anti-choice power broker:

In a year when 11 women are running for the U.S. Senate, including six pro-choice Democratic incumbents, the efforts of a group founded by second-wave feminists, named for a first-wave feminist, could once again be a major force in reducing female representation in Congress.

When Raymond Stansel was busted in 1974, he was one of Florida’s biggest pot smugglers. Facing trial and years in prison, he jumped bail, changed his name, holed up in a remote Australian outpost and began his second life as an environmental hero.

There’s no telling how many guns there are in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.

Tomi Masters was a 23-year-old from Indiana who moved to California with dreams of making it big in the cannabis business. Then she met a hacker who introduced her to a dark new world of digital manipulation, suspicion, paranoia, and fear — one that swallowed her alive and left her floating in a river in the Philippines.

On July 11, 2002, the researchers revealed that they had synthesized the polio virus, which had been wiped out in the US in 1979. It was the first time a virus had been created from scratch with synthetic DNA. The work was funded by the Pentagon in part to establish whether terrorists could pull off such a feat. The answer was yes.

When I say I have a crush on you, what I’m saying is that I’m in love with the distance between us. I’m not in love with you: I don’t even know you. I’m in love with the escape that fantasizing about you promises. Poisoned, stung, bitten and bridled. The promise of being ground down until I disappear.

The story of a massacre in El Salvador.

An execution in war-torn Cuba.

In the aftermath of rape, a transition from prey to predator.

A gardener in Newark, NJ tries to grow the world’s best peppers.

An experiment in public defense.

In the U.S. military, more than half of rape victims are men.

On America’s vanishing night sky and life in perpetual light.

Reinventing a once-great whisky distillery in Scotland.

A profile of Gina Rinehart, the richest person in Australia.

A new era in the search for life on Mars.

A crash course in Tantra and superficial spirituality.

The fate of a star 16-year-old pitcher in Japan.

The benefits of getting sick in New York.

How Paul Ryan remade the Republican Party in his own image.

Bangka Island, a frequently lethal link in a global electronics supply chain.

How the biggest club in Vegas does business.

The old and the new in New York.

Why the flood of money in this election is just the beginning.