Money is an idea that we all agree to believe in.

How contemporary medicine is testing us to death.

Qaddafi’s son is alive. And he wants to take Libya back.

How cars have become weapons at protests, and why it is likely to continue.

One possible (if depressing) conclusion to take from this is that strategy is just an illusory abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand. So maybe strategic theory is really just an gussied up form of conspiracy theory. We need to impose order on the world and believe that someone, somewhere, knows that the hell is going on.

On Clifton “Pop” Herring, the then-26-year-old high school basketball coach who famously left Jordan off the varsity squad as a sophomore.

“You are reading this because you have no idea what NASA is doing. And NASA, tongue-tied by jargon, can’t figure out how to tell you. But the agency is engaged in work that can be more enduring and far-reaching than anything else this country is paying for.”

There is someone whose job it is to try to extract royalty money from anyone who plays music in a place of business. Most people do not react well to this request.

The Darién Gap is a lawless wilderness on the border of Colombia and Panama teeming with everything from deadly snakes to antigovernment guerrillas. For many migrants, crossing it is their only way to get to America.

Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair.

Reg Smythe was the greatest British newspaper strip cartoonist of the 20th Century – and second only to Peanuts’ Charles Schulz on a global scale. So why don’t we treat him that way?

The battle to make The Godfather pitted director Francis Ford Coppola against producers including Robert Evans, and the production itself against the real life mob.

On the mysterious disappearance of a beloved coding legend (and his code) with stops along the way for a short history of programming languages, an ethnography of code-based communities, and an inquiry into what it means to “die young without artifact.”

The Conficker ‘worm’ has replicated itself across tens of millions of computers. Only a few hundred people have the knowledge to recreate how, and no one (except its anonymous maker) fully understands why.

A profile of Viktor Bout, believed to be the largest arms trafficker in the world. A Russian who bought his first cargo planes at age 25, Bout has been in the news recently after being arrested in Thailand.

How the illegitimate son of Liberian ex-President (and accused cannibal) Charles Taylor went from being a small time Florida hoodlum to one of Africa’s most notorious killers.

How to spend $1.2 million per month on your laundry in Kuwait; the system of kickbacks and non-competitive contracts that made Halliburton/KBR the near-exclusive contractor in the Iraq war zone.

“Twenty-two years after being sent to prison for an unspeakable crime he did not commit, Calvin Willis walked out a free man, the 138th American exonerated by DNA evidence. He has won his freedom, yes, but how does a falsely accused man reclaim his life?”

Arthur and Kathleen Breitman thought they held the secret to building a new decentralized utopia. On the way, they plunged into a new kind of hell.

There was no doubt: Jeremy Gross had brutally murdered a convenience store clerk. All that was left to decide was his punishment. Death or life without parole? The story of a capital murder trial, as seen from the jury box.

With state legislatures passing new abortion restrictions, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund follows its own compass on how to best help clients.

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran. The declassified story that became Ben Affleck’s Argo.