“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.

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?

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

A patient arrives in a therapist’s office complaining of writer’s block. He’s not in search of the talking cure, though.

Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.

A profile of the world’s best League of Legends player, a 19-year-old Korean kid whose nickname is God.

Turning down the huge amounts of money a fracking contract can offer is always the beginning of a fight.

“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.”

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

“Has anybody in Westchester County ever called the New York Times his or her ‘friend’? I realize that the rest of America, in its post-Katrina fatigue, is pretty tired of hearing New Orleanians, the city’s acolytes and defenders, always carrying on about how it’s the most unique city in America, but, the fact is, it is. Get over it.

And so, too, is its newspaper.”

A profile of former club kid Michael Alig, who is approaching release after serving 17 years in jail for murder.

Scientists predict Tangier Island could be uninhabitable within 25 years. This is the story of the people willing to go down with it.

“The case of Lisl Auman, who first wrote me from prison three years ago, is so rotten and wrong and shameful that I feel dirty just for knowing about it, and so should you.”