Four years ago, Dominique Jones got out of prison and learned to rap. Today he is, by many metrics, the most popular rapper in the world.

Shut out of the employment market in their 20s, hikkomori shut-ins continue to search for direction in middle age.

Against all odds, it really was a refuge of competence, normalcy and transcendent play. But the outside world has a way of sneaking in.

A drone sighting caused the airport to close for two days in 2018, but despite a lengthy police investigation, no culprit was ever found. So what exactly did people see in the sky?

Over the course of a few hours on April 20, a guy called Cuddles and eight of his pals from the freewheeling world of London’s commodities markets rode oil’s crash to a $660 million profit.

Twenty-five years ago, the tragedy at the World of Primates building broke the city’s heart and raised a loaded question: What, exactly, do we owe the animals in our care?

He was born Linda, but ten years ago Daniel came out as a transgender man. He changed his name to Daniel Valter Jensen, got a new social security number and grew a full beard.

In the small coastal country, an exploding industry has led to big economic promises, and a steep environmental price.

The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

The inside story of a cartel’s deadly assault on a Mexican town near the Texas border—and the U.S. drug operation that sparked it.

The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.

In 2003, the destruction of one particular statue in Baghdad made worldwide headlines and came to be a symbol of western victory in Iraq. But there was so much more to it—or rather, so much less.

In Taipei, young people like Nancy Tao Chen Ying watched as the Hong Kong protests were brutally extinguished. Now they wonder what’s in their future.

If you’re one of four million Ahmadis in Pakistan, posting on Facebook can mean exposing yourself to danger.

A lifetime of brutal injuries and misfortune robbed the world-renowned pianist João Carlos Martins of the ability to play his instrument. And then along came an eccentric designer and his bionic gloves.

Ahmaud Arbery went out for a jog and was gunned down in the street. How running fails Black America.

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?

How Bert Schneider, a well-heeled Hollywood producer with a coke problem and a soft spot for radical politics, smuggled Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers who was awaiting trial on a murder charge, into Cuba in 1974.

Authorities say an American electronics engineer committed suicide after working on a project involving a Chinese telecom giant. His family believes he was murdered.

Shanghai, in 1989 and 2013. Excerpted from A History of Future Cities.

How Russia consistently undermines the U.N. in order to keep a multi-billion dollar monopoly on the sales of helicopters and airplanes.

The story of the attack that killed U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, told from the persepctive of the security agents there to protect him.

On the dangerous state of U.K. banks—“an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal”—and how it can be fixed.

How Hafeez Contractor is creating an alternate India in the sky, where professionsals are “insulated from the chaos that has long hamstrung their homeland.”

He’s spent decades dodging the law. He’s escaped from jail twice by helicopter. He’s given millions to the poor. The story of how Vassilis Paleokostas, Greece’s most wanted man, became a folk hero.