“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.

The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells.

In the days after 9/11, a photo of an unknown man falling from the South Tower appeared in publications across the globe. This is the story of that photograph, and of the search to find the man pictured in it.

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.

An early attempt to explain the world-changing power of computer software—and the minds of young programmers like Bill Gates—to a mass audience. “Software,” the article begins, “is the magic carpet to the future.”

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.

As the snow tires rumbled on the highway beneath us, a neo-Nazi "troll army" was several days into attacking the Jewish people of Whitefish on Spencer's behalf, based on a belief that some Whitefish Jews had recently tried to run Spencer and his mother out of town. Details about what actually happened between the town and the Spencers were in short supply, and, among the neo-Nazi troll brigades, anti-Semitism was in abundance.

“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.

In America's third oldest major city, a new sport has been born. It's called rustling cars. According to auto‑theft statis­tics, Newark has the highest rate of car theft per capita in the nation, more than forty cars each day. Sixty‑five percent of the thefts are perpetrated by teens and preteens, known hereabouts as the Doughnut Boys.

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.

“The dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal—the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.”

An addict navigates 1980s Detroit.

A visit to the hotel North Korea starved to build, still unfinished after breaking ground in 1987.

A visit to a Maine museum devoted to Bigfoot and other mythical creatures.

On the investors betting big on the Iraqi economy, which they believe has nowhere to go but up.

An interview with the novelist.

The magician who spent his life debunking spiritualists and exposing con men.