As a young community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama concluded that to make a real difference, he needed to gain power. A look at how that plan has worked thus far.

The Los Angeles surgeon who can double your size for $13,000.

What adolescence does to adolescents is nowhere near as brutal as what it does to their parents.

An excerpt from All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

With up to four million World War II soldiers considered missing in action on the Eastern front, a group of Russian volunteers vows to unearth, identify and properly bury their remains.

When its informant’s cover was blown, German intelligence destroyed his files. Did his handlers fail to pick up a violent cell that would eventually murder nine immigrants and a cop in order to preserve their asset?

At a playground in North Wales, kids are mostly left alone to experiment with fire, jump from great heights and play in a creek. It’s designed to teach the value of taking risks, a lesson many American children have stopped learning.

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace.

You’re not supposed to just vanish at Vortex Spring. Dive too deep and you might not make it back to the surface, but a search party will eventually find your body. Nobody has found Ben McDaniel yet.

With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except through the use of more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.

On the emerging student loan bubble.

In 1935, a nine-year-old living in Switzerland became the King of Thailand. He would return to his homeland a decade later, and within six months he would be found shot to death in his bed. Though three servants were executed for the crime, a mystery endures.

A visit to the French hideaway of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, who had avoided arrest on murder charges for nearly 20 years.

From our guide to fugitives for Slate.

A profile of Rupert Murdoch from 1995, as he fought monopoly charges in the U.S. and U.K. and prepared to expand his empire into China.

Murdoch is a pirate; he will cunningly circumvent rules, and sometimes principles, to get his way, as his recent adventures in China demonstrate.

What happened to Wesley Autrey after he jumped in front of a New York City subway train to save a man’s life.

Relying on programmers to map real world social connections is like “hiring a Mormon bartender” and other observations on why our strange urge to document the nodes of friendship is doomed.

On the strengths and limitations of the Republican frontrunner:

“The Mormon’s never going to win the who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with contest,” concedes one adviser, while another acknowledges, “He’s never had the experience of sitting in a bar, and like, talking.”

Just days after suffering a concussion, a 17-year-old fullback hangs himself. Inside his family’s journey to learn if a brain injury is to blame.

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

On Enrique of Malacca, “the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.”

After robbing two video stores with a friend, Rene Lima-Marin was sentenced to almost 100 years in prison. Then, due to a clerical error, he was released 88 years too early.

He went from a viral pop hit to an arrest for conspiracy to murder charges in just under six months. Was Bobby Shmurda “too real” for his label?

Bill Conradt, a well-known prosecutor, never arrived at the house in Murphy, Texas, where police and a crew from NBC’s To Catch a Predator were waiting. So the crew, along with a SWAT team, went to Conradt.

The author wanted to give up her day job but keep her lifestyle. So she turned to Seeking Arrangement, a site that pairs rich, older men interested in “companionship” with 20-somethings interested in “gifts.”

The champ is now a vegan, claims to be broke, and says he feels freer than ever before. “I have this uncanny ability to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘This is a pig. You are a fucking piece of shit.’”