The story of Christopher Knight, who lived in the Maine woods for 27 years with virtually no human contact.

An interview with the artchitects responsible for Stuttgart’s train station, Hamburg’s concert house and Berlin’s airport, three projects “currently competing to be seen as the country’s most disastrous.”

When Germany legalized prostitution just over a decade ago, politicians hoped that it would create better conditions and more autonomy for sex workers. It hasn’t worked out that way.

“You know a storm is going to be bad, people in Oklahoma will tell you, when Gary England removes his jacket.” A profile of a meteorologist who has worked Tornado Alley for more than 40 years.

Somaly Mam’s harrowing story of her own flight from sexual servitude and the stories of hundreds of girls she rescued from Cambodian brothels brought her fame and helped raise millions for her non-profit. Does it matter if none or few of the stories are true?

Kids consider changing their personalities and relationships.

A flight attendant's love affair.

A tenth of Kannapolis, North Carolina, residents were laid off after the local textile mill closed. A billionaire bought the mill and turned it into a mecca for biotechnology and life sciences research. Now many residents are human research subjects.

In 1984, Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest. They fell in love, had a son. Then Bob disappeared. It would take 25 years for Jacqui to learn that he had been working undercover.

Tony Ma will bet you as much as $600,000 to train your student for college acceptance. If the student gets into their top choice school, Ma takes the cash. Rejected? He gets nothing.

The fall of Richard Roberts, anointed son and successor of televangelist Oral Roberts, who was fired as president of Oral Roberts University and evicted from the home he’d lived in for nearly 50 years.

How the Mast Brothers fooled people into paying $10 a bar for mediocre chocolate, and how a food blogger was able to figure it out.

A week on the campaign trail in the coffin-shaped Immortality Bus with Zoltan Istvan, the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.

Melissa Cook is carrying triplets for a man she has never met, conceived with an egg that isn't hers. He only wants two of them, but won't let her keep the third. So she is suing, in the hopes that the court will arrive at a new meaning of parenthood.

Sasha Shulgin, a former DOW chemist who now lives a quiet life as a pensioner outside the Bay Area, is responsible for the discovery of the majority of psychedelic compounds currently known.

American demand for drugs gave birth to the cartel war that is paralyzing Mexico, but American guns purchased legally across the Southwest and smuggled over the border have made it staggeringly lethal.

Around the world, governments and corporations are in a race for code that can protect, spy, and destroy—hacks some secretive startups are more than happy to sell.

437 children were removed from Yearning for Zion Ranch as part of the largest custody battle in American history. They were eventually returned to the compound polygamist Warren Jeffs made infamous—but questions remained.

The CIA’s declassified account of the two decades two young officers spent as captives after being shot down over China during the Korean War.

You know this one: German guy heads into tribal jungle deep upriver, sends the company crazy reports full of radical ideas—and then goes totally rogue. Only this time it's not ivory he's after. It's a secret lost for centuries: the finest cacao on earth.

With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.

The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for so-called electrosensitives, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.

For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.

In March 1971, John and Bonnie Raines broke into an FBI office, stealing documents that revealed that the government was spying on its own citizens. Today, they’re hailed as heroes. Is this what the future holds for Edward Snowden?

Merriam-Webster is revising its most authoritative tome for the digital age. But in an era of twerking and trolling, what should a dictionary look like?