How the Google co-founder, forced out of a leadership role in 2001, came back to run the company 10 years later.

Every year, thousands of teenagers from one city in Nigeria risk death and endure forced labor and sex work on the long route to Europe.

A veteran with PTSD takes on the fighter jets that fly above his sanctuary on the Olympic Peninsula.

Whenever the black dress came out, Jessica Weisman’s mother knew she was “going after the Jewish people again.”

When a child vanished in Nova Scotia, online sleuths got involved in the search. Then they lost their way.

The father: an Oscar-winning songwriter. The son, a college dropout and partier around downtown New York. Their alleged crimes; serial casting-couch rape (the senior) and a drowning murder in a Soho House bathtub (the junior).

“Those who were born in the U.S.S.R. and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience,” wrote Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015. “It’s like they’re from different planets.”

Cassie Chadwick pulled her first con in 1870, at the age of 13. Over the next 30 years, she would scam her way to $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.

For 40 years, the city’s lifeguard corps has been mired in controversy, and for 40 years it’s been run by one man: Peter Stein.

The story of the 1944 German national soccer championship game.

The rise and fall of “America’s most exciting black scholar.”

Searching for the person responsible for an iconic piece of 90s design.

A broke agent hustles on the extreme fringe of pro basketball.

How to plan for the most serious of possible natural disasters.

A meditation on the “out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant.”

On the legacy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Inglewood rapper has survived the death, deportation, and displacement of his family and friends.

One possible (if depressing) conclusion to take from this is that strategy is just an illusory abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand. So maybe strategic theory is really just an gussied up form of conspiracy theory. We need to impose order on the world and believe that someone, somewhere, knows that the hell is going on.

“This is a story about an entertainer named R. Kelly. It is a story about the remarkable, but also very strange, pop talent he has. It is a story about the difficult places he came from and the ways they may, or may not, have shaped who he has become. It is also the story of a man who has been publicly accused of multiple sexual offenses with underage women, and who stood trial for making child pornography. He was eventually acquitted of that charge, and his career has continued uninterrupted, but for the most part he has evaded even the most basic questions that might help people understand what is true about him. For this story, R. Kelly agreed to speak about his whole life without restrictions.”

A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.

It was one of the most arresting viral photos of the year: a horde of climbers clogged atop Mount Everest. But it only begins to capture the deadly realities of what transpired that day at 29,000 feet.

How a self-taught doctor from Delhi cornered the black market in kidneys, building one of the world’s most lucrative organ-trading rings, until it all came crashing down.

Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with limits on abortion. Activists like Rebecca Gompert imagine a future where those limits are meaningless because most abortions happen at home.

Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums, amassed a collection of treasures worth more than $1.4 billion, and became perhaps the most prolific art thief in history.

The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped?