Almond growing in California is a $7.6 billion industry that wouldn’t be possible without the 30 billion bees (and hundreds of human beekeepers) who keep the trees pollinated — and whose very existence is in peril.

In February 2015, a cryptic email reached correspondent Ann Cooper from around the globe and across 28 years. It would pull her back into one of the most extraordinary reporting jobs in her career.

For years, rural Guatemalans traveled thousands of miles for jobs in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. A series of immigration raids is creating havoc in a town desperate for workers.

In November 2019, James Le Mesurier, the British co-founder of the Syrian rescue group, fell to his death in Istanbul. What led an internationally celebrated humanitarian to take his own life?

In 1963, a Black politician named Ben Lewis was shot to death in Chicago. Clues suggest the murder was a professional hit. Decades later, it remains no accident authorities never solved the crime.

A recent raid in Italy involving rare Chilean species highlights the growing scale of a black market in the thorny plants.

Federal agencies have long struggled to stop illegal fishing and drug smuggling in the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, it’s only gotten worse.

On a remote island in Maine, a group of friends thought they witnessed one man killing another with an ax. But no one was ever arrested. In a small town far out at sea, justice sometimes works a little differently.

Inside the five-year (so far) production of the Ilya Khrzhanovsky film Dau:

Khrzhanovsky came up with the idea of the Institute not long after preproduction on Dau began in 2006. He wanted a space where he could elicit the needed emotions from his cast in controlled conditions, twenty-four hours a day. The set would be a panopticon. Microphones would hide in lighting fixtures (as they would in many a lamp in Stalin's USSR), allowing Khrzhanovsky to shoot with multiple film cameras from practically anywhere — through windows, skylights, and two-way mirrors. The Institute's ostensible goal was to re-create '50s and '60s Moscow, home to Dau's subject, Lev Landau. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Landau significantly advanced quantum mechanics with his theories of diamagnetism, superfluidity, and superconductivity. He also tapped epic amounts of ass.

“In the recent history of American music, there’s no figure parallel to Lehrer in his effortless ascent to fame, his trajectory into the heart of the culture — and then his quiet, amiable, inexplicable departure.”

“We, the writers—a word I am using in its most primitive sense—arrived in Chicago about 10 days before the baffling, bruising, an unbelievable two minutes and six seconds at Comiskey Park. We will get to all that later.”

“Redistricting today has become the most insidious practice in American politics—a way, as the opportunistic machinations following the 2010 census make evident, for our elected leaders to entrench themselves in 435 impregnable garrisons from which they can maintain political power while avoiding demographic realities.”

The former chancellor of New York City schools was not, in fact, “a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.”

An interview with a woman who works in one of the exclusive hostess bars in Tokyo’s Ginza district, where an elite clientele pay heavily for champagne, whiskey, and conversation, and client-hostess relationships can span decades.

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

In 1985, a lost 22-year-old wrote a letter to a Manson girl-turned-model prisoner, asking for advice on conquering his demons. Then they fell in love.

How Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, with a little help from the Bush Administration, got 140 trees chopped down in a national park to improve his view and ruined the life of a park ranger in the process.

Since 2007, when they first heard that “the Florida of Russia” was being awarded the Winter Olympics, two Dutch journalists have been documenting everyday life in Sochi and how it has changed in the run-up to the Games.

The closest thing that the international network of hackers Anonymous has to an organizer lives in a 378 sq. ft apartment in Dallas and, at the time of this interview, was on his fourth day of opiate withdrawal.

The story of Dean Corll and his accomplices, who killed over 20 teenage boys in the Heights neighborhood of Houston in the early 1970s, and the families searching for their missing sons.

On “the Incidents”, three shootings in a single month in a 1,300 person hamlet tucked inside the 12-year-old Nunavut territory. (The complete 4-part series.)

Manny Pacquiao, possibly the greatest boxer of his era and still in his fighting prime, on the campaign trail for a congressional seat in the remote, untamed Southern province of the Phillipines that spawned him.

In 1992, a Chinese freighter tipped violently in a storm dumping a load of plastic floatee toys—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—to the open sea. This is their story.