The United States fights wars it can’t win using soldiers it doesn’t know.

It isn’t easy to find out the truth about the benefits of male circumcision.

The beginnings of the best-selling video game, from a chapter of David Kushner’s new book on the subject.

On the escape of hundreds of insurgents from Kandahar’s Sarposa Prison through a tunnel dug from the outside, and an unlikely suspect: the jail’s former warden.

How Google’s utopian/dystopian plan to scan the world’s books failed and the Harvard-led team that’s picking up the pieces.

A profile of life in Owsley County, one of the poorest in the country.

The frenzied few days before the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

The underground routes by which drugs enter the U.S. from Mexico, and the officials who’ve found it almost impossible to curb their construction.

Reporting from Kuwait on the week of its liberation, a brutal account of the atrocities committed during seven months of Iraqi occupation.

John Georgelas was a military brat and drug enthusiast from Texas. Now he’s a prominent figure within the Islamic State.

A 48-hour reconstruction of the Breitscheidplatz Attack and the political response.

The men whose profitable (and self-serving) antics preserved what we know of the Brontë sisters.

The Hollywood backroom machinations that got the biopic to movie screens.

A photographer captured the moment when a race organizer confronted a woman who’d snuck into the race.

Inside the compulsive world of airline rewards hobbyists, who spend the bulk of their lives flying around the world for free.

The button that ruined the internet—and how to fix it.

A profile of the author on the eve on his debut novel, The Water Dancer.

The inside story of the president and Deutsche Bank, his lender of last resort.

A profile of the actor in the wake of the loss of his wife.

The remarkable stories of the nine other women in the Harvard Law class of ‘59.

The pandemic comes to Star City, the secretive home of Russia’s space program.

As the wilderness gets overrun, the most hated man in the Rockies finds an audience of emulators and antagonists.

Pictet, a 215-year-old firm rooted firmly in the past, finds tension adapting to the modern world.

What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.