The country’s elites are desperate to figure out what they got wrong in 2016. But can they handle the truth?

How the singer became the target of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ early, racially-motivated war on drugs. </br></br>

Excerpted from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

In 1902, a poet attempts to stage the world’s first “perfume concert.”

The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise?

The fight over an alleged Israeli war crime.

On the difficult challenges faced by an auteur in Nigeria’s burgeoning Nollywood film economy.

Despite its association with piracy, BitTorrent is a company in its own right, and one desperate to hit upon a way to monetize its revolutionary file transfer technology.

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.

Guz Dominguez says he was trying to help baseball players from Cuba; the U.S. government says he was smuggling athletes. The truth is more complicated.

A profile of Florida legend—and pardoned killer—Charlie Driver.

The man behind the craze for fermented alcoholic tea likes to tell the story of his own conception.

A voyage to North Sentinel island, home to one of the last entirely isolated populations on Earth.

How a drifter from Milwaukee became the chief executioner of the Cuban Revolution—and a test case for U.S. civil rights.

Stylistically speaking, in terms of clothing, they arrived in shirts and pants and shoes (there’s really no other way to say it). They had haircuts, but it didn’t really look it. While other bands were mumbling or over-enunciating their dreary positions or penny-candy philosophies, Pavement kind of screamed for a generation. But they did it in a way that was so deeply American that it was almost Scandinavian.

Playwright Will Eno profiles the band and their cult as they grow up and prepare for a reunion.

How Tim Durham funded a libertine lifestyle—dozens of luxury cars, Playboy-themed parties, a plethora of failed businesses—on the backs of unwitting Ohioans, many of them Amish.

A personal reconstruction.

An investigation into the mass graves in Texas that contain the remains of migrants.

The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass "tough-on-crime" legislation — combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws — has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties. The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two decades have converged and reached extremes.

“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

On the road with the makeup-clad band.

The relationship between Buffalo and its team.

Life as a human cannonball.

The investigation that brought down K2 Productions.