Enlightened is probably the sharpest satire of modern white-collar work since the original British version of The Office, and its skewering of this world intertwines with its portrait of individual personalities so deftly that you can’t separate them. Creator Mike White captures the unsettling blandness of office protocol, politics and jargon, from the chill that workers feel when Human Resources calls them out of the blue to the impressive-sounding word salad labels that the company gives to its departments and projects. (The experimental department to which the newly demoted Amy is assigned is called “Cogentiva.”)

A son, the illusion of his dead father and where technology intersects with real life.

A woman bonds with her terminally ill sister over food, memories, and shaky lives.

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

How the People’s Temple tore one family apart, told in part via letters:

We have at long last opened our hearts to you, expressing the sorrow and agony which we have restrained over six long years. Any time you express the wish to resume normal relations and exchange with us, the past will be forgotten. For after all we do love you and the children more than any other persons. We shall continue to cherish you to our last day on earth. The peerless joy of raising you from childhood to youth is a unique life experience, indeed. Your father and mother

Ann Casey pulled herself out of poverty by becoming one of the most revered wrestlers in America. Then she was shot by a drug-running truck driver. This is the story of her comeback.

A father’s attempt to combat the wage gap.

After two months in the hospital, a mother finally got to take her premature baby home. Then she spent five years trying to convince him to eat.

A profile of environmental activist Tim DeChristopher.

What happened when a plane full of marijuana crashed in Yosemite Park.

A look inside Donald Trump’s portfolio of exclusive real estate properties.

A case of peafowl dividing a neighborhood.

“They played a game of chess with our lives and we lost.”

A profile of Damon Lawner and his mansion.

A profile of Spears at her nadir.

Barry Michels is Hollywood’s most successful therapist cum motivation coach with an approach that combines Jungian psychology, encouraging patients to embrace their dark side, and “three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.”

How a once-lauded psychiatrist became a prolific prescriber of painkillers in one of Virginia’s poorest and most isolated counties.

A profile of CeaseFire, a group of “violence interrupters” attempting to prevent street shootings by treating them like an infectious disease.

Pakistan has received global praise for the design and maintenance of a vast system that holds the information of 98% of the country’s population. For some, however, it is making normal life impossible.

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

His health failing and his business in tatters, the head of Death Row Records faces murder charges that could put him away for life.

A son goes to visit his dying father.

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Most people think they’d be thrilled to have their memoir snapped up for a movie. The author had a different, more troubled experience.

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?