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?

The rise of the Night Wolves, a Kremlin-backed biker gang, and what it says about the Russian political condition.

The controversy surrounding the death of Uche Okafor.

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.

Tracking down 40-odd members of the British band.

It's a Tuesday morning in December, and I'm ringing people called Brown in Rotherham. "Hello," I begin again. "I'm trying to trace Jonnie Brown who used to play in the Fall. He came from Rotherham and I wondered if you might be a relative." "The Who?" asks the latest Mr Brown. "No. The Fall - the band from Salford. He played bass for three weeks in 1978." "Is this some kind of joke?"

“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.”

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.

Every month, thousands of deportees from the United States and hundreds of asylum-seekers from around the world arrive in Tijuana. Many never leave.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When your family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life — waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy, as you are more dead than alive. Just how does a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go on?

The postscript to a miracle.