How agents took down Mexico’s most vicious drug cartel and, in the process, gave El Chapo the opportunity to create an empire.

Why “the legal equivalent of outer space” continues to exist, fifteen years after 9/11.

Rabbi Barry Freundel said he would help dozens of women convert to Judaism. In the process, he secretly videotaped them naked.

A report from the border of ISIS territory in Iraq, where civilians are battling to survive.

How one man wants to transport the world’s heaviest cargo in airships that are lighter than air.

In his own final days, a Right to Die activist tells the story of his secret, illegal assisted-suicide service.

When massive ships sink, burn, fall apart or get stuck, their owners call Nick Sloane. His job: figure out how to save as much as he can.

How the author writes best-selling non-fiction books without the ability to leave her house.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, used to be a place with kids and schools and churches and houses. Then the ground caught on fire.

Seventy years after three of the bloodiest days in U.S. history, the battle continues to bring the missing men home.

America’s biggest for-profit foster care agency has a history of abuse, neglect, and even deaths to account for.

The British and Irish have coined some fabulous terms to describe nature and landscrape. “Doofers” is the Scots’ term for horse-shit; “clinkerbell” means icicle in Hampshire.

A correspondence school for writers turns out to be a sham. This piece forced it into bankruptcy.

Fast food used to be a transitional, temporary work. In Creston, Iowa, it has become a career.

There are two roles to play in the new world of on-demand everything: royalty or servant.

Nowadays, the young and privileged view un- and under-paid assistantships as the road to a successful creative career. Are they deluding themselves?

From Stefani Joanne Germanotta to Lady Gaga: the self-invented, manufactured, accidental, totally on-purpose creation of the world’s biggest pop star.

The city of Boston, the Tea Party movement, and the rightful heir to the American Revolution.

Karaoke renditions of ‘My Way’ have led to murders in the Phillipines.

It took a desperate screenwriter to find Max Mermelstein, Miami’s former coke overlord, after twenty-five years in hiding.

How a celebrated American artist was forced to trade his multimillion-dollar collection for a job selling donuts.

A woman posing as a non-profit worker kidnaps a formerly homeless pregnant woman and tries to claim her baby. [PART 2]

Less than a week after Katrina, Michael Lewis goes home to New Orleans.

A mission in Baghdad to let a photojournalist get a shot of an insurgent corpse ends up getting a Marine killed.

The mother of a child born with a deformed brain responds, heartbreakingly, to an academic study claiming that people are happier without kids.