“As a young reporter in Eastern Europe in 2001, I expected to witness the ‘end of history’ and the flowering of democracy. That was just one of the mistakes I made.”

A 42,000-word, 3-continent spanning “hacker tourist” account of the laying of the (then) longest wire on earth.

When New Yorkers lived knee-deep in trash.

Reconstructing an ancient African civilization heretofore mostly ignored.

To the KGB and back.

The strange history of border fortifications.

Ida Wood, who lived for decades as a recluse in a New York City hotel, would have taken her secrets to the grave—if her sister hadn’t gotten there first.

Humanity has 30 years to find out.

It was burned and sunk to hide the crime. Now its probable remains have been located.

On Edgar Ray Killen.

The writer’s mother had always said that she had married at 12. Was she lying?

How Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong struggle with clinical depression was a key to his presidency.

No one knows quite what to do with these coerced masks made from the faces of Native American POWS.

“The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.”

How one of the world’s top conductors became ensnared in a WWI-era scandal.

The Western Hemisphere before Columbus.

In 1921, a teenager died alone in Kentucky and was buried without a name. A century later, a team of sleuths set out to find his identity.

A man goes searching for his past.

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.

On the roamings of prolific blind explorer James Holman.

A history of the Village Voice.

In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.

A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.

In 1937, Harvard researchers began following the lives of 268 students. Year after year, the men were interviewed and given medical and psychological exams. The goal? Find a formula for happiness.

The true story of M Company: from Fort Dix to Vietnam in 50 days.