As Playboy magazine moves to Los Angeles, the writer considers its place in the Midwest.

No other general interest magazine tried to reach readers in the wide swathe of land between New York and California. “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there. If you wanted it to be hip, edgy, go toe-to-toe with GQ, you were making a mistake,” said Chris Napolitano, a former executive editor who began at Playboy in 1988.

You get steeped in this stuff as a kid, even if some part of you was always skeptical, it's hard to lose the residual sense that everything unfolding in the world—from natural disasters to commerce and geopolitics—signals some approaching doomsday.

Las Vegas casinos operating in Macau rely on “junkets” to bring in the gambling elite, but the money and murder for hire trails lead straight to the Triads.

DecorMyEyes is a online eyewear store with an unusual business plan; the owner harasses and intimidates customers who complain in order to get negative reviews posted across the web, in turn making his website more visible to Google searchers.

Twenty-two years in, E-40 has extended his reign over the Bay Area rap landscape by returning to “making music the way he did back in the late ’80s: completely independently, selling his raps more or less directly to his fans.”

The rising Democratic star was found in a Miami Beach hotel with a male sex worker and suspected drugs. To keep their marriage together, he and his wife, R. Jai, had to embrace a new dynamic of “radical honesty” in their relationship.

“That learning to cook could lead an American woman to success of any kind would have seemed utterly implausible in 1949; that it is so thoroughly plausible 60 years later owes everything to Julia Child’s legacy.”

In 1995, the Chicago Reader profiled a little-known professor (and lawyer and philanthropist and author) who had decided to run for office to get back to his true passion: community organizing.

His wife murdered his mother, tried to do the same to him, and was prepared to orphan their 8-month-old child. The attempt left him blind. Then he defended her in court.

A visit to Tokyo’s first co-sleeping cafe, where one can pay a set fee to sleep next to a woman in 20 minute increments, though spooning, being patted on the head, and a change of pajamas are extra.

The largest crowdfunding site in the world puts up a mirror to who we are and what matters most to us. Try not to look away.

The story of Thor Holm Hansen—”Norwegian country singer, a former Outlaws motorcycle chieftain, and an ‘ambassador at large’ to a rebel Haitian government”—who claims to be back in Florida to locate his missing daughter.

John Scott is a hockey enforcer — he makes his living fighting, not scoring goals. Scott wasn’t supposed to make the NHL. He certainly wasn’t supposed to make the all-star game. But when the fans voted him in, the league tried to keep him on the bench.

A profile of 22-year-old hacker George Hotz, who in 2007 became the first person to successfully unlock the iPhone. A few years later, he became the first person to successfully hack the Playstation 3. And, shortly thereafter, he became the first person to get sued by Sony for it.

She went to jail 35 years ago after driving the getaway car in an infamous robbery and defiantly refusing to admit the act was wrong. Her sentence was 75 years. But something changed in prison — Judy Clark went from radical to model inmate. This week her sentence was commuted.

Earlier this month, while China's leaders were staging a grandiose celebration of their revolution's 40th birthday, thousands of somber Hong Kong residents gathered for a dreary commemoration of their own. Far from the fireworks display in Beijing, Hong Kongers huddled in a rainstorm near the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, singing patriotic songs and listening to mournful poems dedicated to those who died in Tiananmen Square.

As divided families argued over whether to stay or go, Jones saw part of his congregation slipping away. Al Simon, father of three, wanted to take his children back to America. "No! No! No!" screamed his wife. Someone whispered to her: "Don't worry, we're going to take care of everything." Indeed, as reporters learned later from survivors, Jones had a plan to plant one or more fake defectors among the departing group, in order to attack them. He told some of his people that the Congressman's plane "will fall out of the sky."

From a childhood in the Kremlin to a trip to New Delhi carrying the ashes of her Indian Communist lover, defection at the U.S. Embassy… “finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.”

How a bid to unseat Senator Thad Cochran led to an illegal photo in a nursing home, a flurry of arrests, and the death of the man who brought the Tea Party to Mississippi.

They were an ordinary pair of small-time criminals in the UK. Then they figured out how to blow up an ATM.

In 1965, Wheat was sentenced to death for armed robbery and murder. When his sentence was commuted, he decided to devote the rest of his life to helping people.

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.

After two months in the hospital, a mother finally got to take her premature baby home. Then she spent five years trying to convince him to eat.

“In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He’s feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.”

In the days after 9/11, a photo of an unknown man falling from the South Tower appeared in publications across the globe. This is the story of that photograph, and of the search to find the man pictured in it.