Computer scientist tycoon Robert Mercer is at the heart of a shockingly well-funded propaganda network.

Conspiracy theorists think that the government killed the aspiring Libertarian filmmaker David Crowley to stop him from making his film about an authoritarian takeover of the United States and the vets who fight back. The truth is far stranger.

On the dilemmas facing a (very famous) working mother in New York City. “It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam—which, let me make it very clear, I have not done—than it is to speak honestly about this topic.”

The dramatic liberties a much-heralded film takes with historical fact show how hard it is to get complexity onto the big screen.

Brian Windhorst was one of the first reporters to cover LeBron James. He was there in high school. There at the draft. There in Cleveland. And now he’s there in Miami, though the relationship is far from what it used to be.

For 10 years, Libre—an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity—has been working to foster conservatism in Hispanic communities. Now, the group is going all-in on Georgia’s Senate runoffs.

“Why do people laugh when tickled? Why can’t you tickle yourself? Why are certain parts of the body more ticklish than others? Why do some people enjoy tickling and others not? And what is tickling, after all?”

Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.

In the shallow reefs of Ayungin Shoal sits a rusted-out ship manned by eight Filipino soldiers whole sole purpose is to keep China in check.

She entered the national spotlight after she live streamed the death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, who was shot by police during a traffic stop. This is Diamond Reynolds’s life today.

Andre Thomas cut out his children’s hearts and removed his own eyes. Texas considers him sane.

Uber made big promises in Kenya. Drivers say it’s ruined their lives.

He’d sold his company, chartered a yacht, and set off with his model girlfriend to see the world. Finally, it seemed, Chris Smith was living the life he’d always wanted. But back home there was trouble: missing money, unraveling secrets, and a sudden question. Where the hell was Chris Smith, really?

How the tapping of Angola’s natural resources has kept the country a killing field, and made it one of the world’s most glaringly inefficient kleptocracies.

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

David Simon and Richard Price, two of the greatest crime storytellers of our time, talk about their craft.

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

On the perils and poisons of mining for gold in southeastern Peru.

On the language of hobos and the dictionaries it spawned.

"Some in Nice knew the man as one of the many playboy predators the city seems to beget—black hair slicked back off a shining brow, dress shoes tapering to varnished points, a dark shirt unbuttoned low to reveal the pectorals into which he had obsessively, unblushingly, invested himself. He was 31 but preferred older women, both for their erotic openness and, it seems clear, for their money. Those who knew him best knew him to be a cold and brutal man, detached, amused by little save rough sex and gore."

An interview with Greil Marcus on the songs of Van Morrison and why people are afraid of imagined things.

The rise and fall of Quayside, a futuristic city concept that Google’s Sidewalk Labs planned to build in neglected part of Toronto.

“With the rise of factory farming, milk is now a most unnatural operation.”