How to photograph Los Angeles from a helicopter.

Why some innovations spread quick while others take decades to catch hold.

Ego, hubris, and the failure to adapt.

A technical explanation of the real program to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The wild competition to be “worshipped” by Alaska’s most eligible bachelors.

A young mother transplants her family to Bahia.

A profile of Rupert Murdoch, written before his empire began to crumble.

On the insurer’s insurer and calculating the risk of modern catastrophe:

Reinsurers are ultimately responsible for every new thing that God can come up with. As losses grew this decade, year by year, reinsurers have been working to figure out what they can do to make the God clause smaller, to reduce their exposure. They have billions of dollars at stake. They are very good at thinking about the world to come.

An early take on the dark side of cyberspace:

Like many newcomers to the "net"--which is what people call the global web that connects more than thirty thousand on-line networks--I had assumed, without really articulating the thought, that while talking to other people through my computer I was going to be sheltered by the same customs and laws that shelter me when I'm talking on the telephone or listening to the radio or watching TV. Now, for the first time, I understood the novelty and power of the technology I was dealing with.

An orgy of free song-sharing seems to be exactly the kind of thing that the horrified labels would quickly clamp down on. But they appear to be starting to accept that their fortunes rest with the geeks. Or at least they’re trying to talk a good game. “I’m not part of the past—I’m part of the future,” says Lucian Grainge, chair and CEO of the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group. “There’s a new philosophy, a new way of thinking.”

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

A trip to a modern African megacity.

The 1900 death of Fritz and the battle to define his legacy.

He decided to bury a box of treasure in the desert. Why?

A casino failed to save Tunica, Mississippi.

Looking to Nietzsche for self-help.

The plot to erode the key legislative gains of the civil rights era.

Timothy Treadwell liked to say that, “Grizzlies are misunderstood.” Then one killed him.

Talking to Lee Daniels about Empire, Hollywood, and survival.

Almost ten years after his kidnapping, a man writes to the people who threatened his life.

A map of the Queen of Cookbooks’ rise to power.

“We take the bus when we can’t afford to do anything but disappear.”

How solitary confinement can lead to suicide.

What does it take for heroin to grab hold in the small, remote towns of America? Like any business, it starts with one man and an entrepreneurial dream.