Foreign students are lied to and exploited on every front. They’re also propping up higher education as we know it

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

The comic answers some uncomfortable questions.

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

The symptoms are here: multiyear droughts, large-scale crop failures, a major city—Cape Town—on the verge of going dry, increasing outbreaks of violence, fears of full-scale water wars. The big question: How do we keep the water flowing?

Why psychologists love “priming.”

On a desolate, six-mile stretch of Indian beachfront, the bulk of the world’s big ships are dismantled for scrap. Though a ship is usually worth over $1 million in steel, the margins are low, the leftovers are toxic, and the labor—which employs huge numbers of India’s poor—is wildly dangerous.

Argentina’s Lio Messi, the best soccer player on the planet, stands all of 5’7” and needed growth-hormone injections to get there.

Steve Miller had a clear-cut legal case when the Geto Boys used his guitar-hook in their raunchy 1990 single “Gangster of Love.” The racial implications weren’t so simple.

Excerpted from The Geto Boys(Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series, 2016) .

How volunteer firefighters responded to a lethal West, Texas explosion.

How New York City built its own CIA.

Bernie Kerik and Jack Abramoff on “Club Fed.”

Nine innings with Mr. Baseball.

A young woman with a rare condition navigates El Paso.

A flamboyant player, a charismatic coach, and a sex predator.

Juries trust DNA. But should they?

How one man terrorized a small Illinois town.

Five murders. Two confessions. A mysterious envelope.

Inside a multimillion dollar scandal.

Malls were supposed to die. Instead they’re just being reimagined (again).

How to run a fashion empire.

“It’s like I’m risking my life for a dollar.”

Scare stories on “left-wing illiberalism” display a familiar pattern.

An interview with Steve Albini on art, commerce, and ethic.

A trip to the South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race.