Chess in Cuba.

On oil spills in Colombia.

In a nondescript office park in suburban Florida, a company you’ve never heard of is making a product that few people have ever seen. And it has $1.4 billion in funding.

The developer responsible for the tallest residential building in New York—the penthouse just sold for $90 million—lives in a two-story house in Queens.

They were raised Hasidic in Brooklyn. Now Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz live a decadent, booze-filled life in Puerto Rico. They are in their early 30s and rich enough to retire, while Wall Street is busy adopting the shady loan scheme they pioneered.

Mark Karpelès ran the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until a heist made it insolvent, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement in Japanese prison.

Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar and David Thompson bonded in juvenile detention in the 1980s, then spent most of the next 40 years in prison. When they emerged from one of the country’s most unforgiving state penal systems, their friendship proved crucial.

The plight of temporary workers in America.

Listening to music in prison.

Life in the French Foreign Legion.

On the increasingly dangerous situation for journalists in Syria.

On the ground in post-disaster Japan.

Why the US intervened in Libya.

Adventures in something called “Radical Honesty.”

Practicing photography in Switzerland.

The Castro, 1990, and a first night in drag.

Nobody noticed Connie Converse when she was trying to get a record deal in New York in the 1950s. Nobody stopped her when she left her life in Michigan in 1974, never to be seen again. Today, her music is heard by tens of thousands.

On the ground in Wilmington.

On bareback horse relay racing, a Native American tradition:

“It’s going to be America’s next extreme sport,” he predicts. “Compare it to Professional Bull Riders, PBR. Look how big that got—a million in prize money in every city they go to. That’s how Indian Relay is going to be in 10 years. I look for it to be at every track in the country by 2025.

How Washington left students to drown in debt.

A quest for tigers in India.

In the wings of this great drama were the unseen. Hidden in the rainforest where the violence was staged, in the eerie aftermath of the tragedy, were three people whose stories cue political contexts in both the US and Guyana crucial to understanding how and why Jonestown may have happened.

How order collapsed in an American city.

On the suicide crisis in rural East Texas.