How what was once one of the most popular websites on Earth—with ambitions to redefine music, dating, and pop culture—became a graveyard of terrible design and failed corporate initiatives:

In retrospect, DeWolfe says, the imperative to monetize the site stunted its evolution: "When we did the Google deal, we basically doubled the ads on our site," making it more cluttered. The size, quality, and placement of ads became another source of tension with News Corp., according to DeWolfe and another executive. "Remember the rotten teeth ad?" DeWolfe says. "And the weight-loss ads that would show a stomach bulging over a pair of pants?"

Carried away by love—for risk and for each other—two of the world’s best freedivers went to the limits of their sport. Only one came back.

Murder in the Juarez Valley:

A few weeks after Saul Reyes and his family fled Mexico, I drove to an immigrant shelter in downtown El Paso to see him. As the former city secretary of Guadalupe, Saul had once been in charge of recording the births and deaths of everyone in his hometown. He’d taken it upon himself now to collect every single name of those who had died or disappeared in Guadalupe since the killing began in 2008. Through media reports and meetings with the many valley exiles now living in Texas, Saul had compiled a list of the town’s dead and disappeared. Showing me the book, he turned page after page of names. So far he had counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and eight unknown bodies dumped in his small town of 3,000 people. “There are a lot more, but these are the ones I’ve been able to collect,” he said. In his careful, spidery script, he had written on one page the names of his six family members.

A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events.

What would drive a man to stand outside the Vatican embassy nearly every day for 14 years?

How the author writes best-selling non-fiction books without the ability to leave her house.

Less than a week after Katrina, Michael Lewis goes home to New Orleans.

“Private prisons are shrouded in secrecy. I took a job as a guard to get inside—then things got crazy.”

On surfer girls in Maui; the story that led to the film Blue Crush.

Caveh Zahedi’s abject, self-defeating, ethically questionable, maddeningly original approach to documentary.

Three days in the creative wilderness with Francis Farewell Starlite, the reclusive muse to Kanye West, Bon Iver and Drake.

How phone phreakers, many of them blind, opened up Ma Bell to unlimited free international calling using a technical manual and a toy organ.

As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.

A trip to The Villages, a booming retiremement community outside Orlando, where the golf is free, casual sex is everywhere, and there is no cemetery.

An investigative reporter goes undercover at a dealership to learn the tricks of the trade, of which there are many.

How an up-and-coming Boston surgeon became best known for leaving a patient on the operating table while he skipped out to cash a check.

Inside the real lives of people who came early to intentionally provoking, confusing, and generally screwing with strangers online.

You watch your best friend jump off a bridge trying to end his life. What do you do? Vino Richemond jumped in after him.

The Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another.

The enormous life of Anthony Bourdain, according to those who knew him best.

The story of a bank robber who risked his life to put a killer on death row.