A cop kills a fellow officer during a drug bust and claims it was an accident. Others suspect that it wasn’t.

How did a tenure-track professor wind up selling his plasma? A story about debt.

“I come to America, I go to England, I go to France…nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure. … It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk—in their personal life.”

A profile of environmental activist Tim DeChristopher.

A look inside Donald Trump’s portfolio of exclusive real estate properties.

A case of peafowl dividing a neighborhood.

“They played a game of chess with our lives and we lost.”

A profile of Spears at her nadir.

He was the best alpinist of his generation, a quiet, unassuming Canadian known for bold ascents of some of the world’s most iconic peaks. Four months ago, at the age of 25, he traveled to Alaska to join climber Ryan Johnson for a first ascent outside Juneau. They never came back.

In a shantytown near Johannesburg, an angry mob committed a horrifying crime that was caught on video.

Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social-media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons — sometimes before anybody’s even read them.

Protests, populism, and progressivism all clashed in a battle royal. But what really drives election results?

After a member of the Church of Wells abruptly left the group (which may or may not be a cult), many held out hope. A week later she went back, and the church’s elders are eager to explain why.

Previously: Sinners in the Hands

Is the anonymous, reclusive inventor of Bitcoin this 64-year-old man in Los Angeles?

Sissel Tolaas is a star in the world of smells. Her methods are not always subtle.

A trip to an uncompromising cattle ranch.

On the arrival of Formula 1 in India.

On “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez,who terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco through a string of over 30 home invasion murders starting in 1984 and ending when he was recognized and apprehended by an angry mob.

Behind a financial fraud lay a secret plan to create a “mothership for con artists worldwide”:

Gamboa's tale involves secret ore deposits, hidden stocks of Soviet nuclear armaments, the Queen Mary ocean liner, portions of Antarctica, a new version of the Bible, allegations of fake deaths and miraculous resurrections, and a collection of some of the most colorful aliases ever to grace America's criminal and civil case dockets. (According to court documents, Korem also answers to the names Tzemach Ben David Netzer Korem and Branch Vinedresser.)

A profile of CeaseFire, a group of “violence interrupters” attempting to prevent street shootings by treating them like an infectious disease.

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.

On getting weight reduction surgery.

On the trade school’s business model and its founder, a former movie producer named Jerry Sherlock.

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.