A dispatch from the World Clown Association Convention.

On faith and football.

Life in Mosul.

Life with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis.

Yearning for conception.

On a transition and its aftermath.

On the tortured psyche of former 49ers coach Bill Walsh and how it led to Finding the Winning Edge, his 550-page guide to the game that has become the football’s bible.

The story of the “Barefoot Bandit,” a teenage fugitive on the run.

In 1956, an ocean liner named the Andrea Doria sank off the coast of Cape Cod. Half a century later, deep-sea divers—the author included—were still risking their lives to explore it.

Cheryl Shuman has been a coupon queen, an optician to the stars and the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Steven Segal. Now she’s the face of the high-end weed market.

Life on the outside is full of unpleasant surprises for longtime inmates.

The dilemma of providing quality health care for undocumented immigrants, and how one city is attempting to solve it.

On the last weekend of April 2011, two things happened in Washington D.C.: the annual White House Correspondents Dinner and the decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound. This is the story of how both transpired.

“This is the story of Billy Conn, who won the girl he loved but lost the best fight ever.”

The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, one ill-fated cruise ship became a symbol for the panic and confusion that would soon engulf the globe. What two harrowing weeks trapped aboard the ocean liner felt like—for unsuspecting tourists, for frightened crew members, and for the captain himself.

“It looks as though someone has slapped three pounds of wet clay onto his face, where it clings, burying the boy inside. But Sam, the boy behind the mask, peers out from the right eye. It is clear, perfectly formed and a deep, penetrating brown.”

The aftermath of a revolution:

Amid all the chaos of Libya’s transition from war to peace, one remarkable theme stood out: the relative absence of revenge. Despite the atrocities carried out by Qaddafi’s forces in the final months and even days, I heard very few reports of retaliatory killings. Once, as I watched a wounded Qaddafi soldier being brought into a hospital on a gurney, a rebel walked past and smacked him on the head. Instantly, the rebel standing next to me apologized. My Libyan fixer told me in late August that he had found the man who tortured him in prison a few weeks earlier. The torturer was now himself in a rebel prison. “I gave him a coffee and a cigarette,” he said. “We have all seen what happened in Iraq.” That restraint was easy to admire.

Michael Brown beat the odds by graduating from high school before his death—odds that remain stacked against black students in St. Louis and the rest of the country.

An acquaintance dies in Iraq and a writer investigates. “How did Michael come to inspire such loyalty? And how did he come to die on the floodplain of the Euphrates? I looked closer and saw they were the same.”

On January 13th, 2018, the residents of Hawaii picked up their phones to find a warning: a missile would be hitting the islands imminently. Here’s what people do when they think they only have 38 minutes left to live.

For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?

Vera Pratt moved to the island at age 70 hoping to find many years of happiness. Then she met “Psychic Angela” and her future got a whole lot more complicated.

In the city of Rosario, some fans have evolved into a mafia with an illicit cash flow and a stable of hit men. A look inside their homicidal turf war.