An essay on how we misremember our youth.

If you are an enemy of Putin, there’s one city where intrigue and assassins are bound to follow you.

As a nation unwinds, Leopoldo López, the opposition’s most prominent leader, sits under house arrest and contemplates what might still be possible.

The profits and controversy of posthumous celebrity.

Thirty years ago, a series of documentaries introduced the world to an isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea. What happened when the cameras left?

Reconstructing an ancient African civilization heretofore mostly ignored.

An investigation into the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency.

What we know (and don’t), more than a year after American diplomats began to suffer strange, concussion-like symptoms in Cuba.

Dead construction workers, a corrupt political family, and the “impossibly lucrative casino” on the island of Saipan where Chinese gamblers can game on U.S. soil.

The strange history of border fortifications.

How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific

An Afghanistan love story.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

A 4-year-old girl was the sole survivor of a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan. Then she disappeared.

Inside the world of dark tourism, where for just $2,500 you too could be responsible for a geopolitical calamity.

Humanity has 30 years to find out.

A Venezuelan cop who had previously starred in an action movie stole a helicopter and fired on the Supreme Court. He became a rebel folk hero, moving amongst safe houses with a small band of followers, until he was killed in a shoot-out that he broadcast live on Instagram.

Facebook was supposed to open up societies like Cambodia—but instead it has wreaked havoc on the fragile political order and destroyed opposition leadership.

How the President’s son-in-law, despite his inexperience in diplomacy and his lack of security clearance, became Beijing’s primary point of interest.

From a penthouse on Central Park, Guo Wengui has exposed a phenomenal web of corruption in China’s ruling elite — if, that is, he’s telling the truth.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. may face violence and murder in their home countries. What happens when they are forced to return?

Inside China’s vast new experiment in social ranking.

A young couple, their warring families, and the risks of marrying for love in India.

What it means to be beautiful in the most populous country on earth.

“His goal is to stay in power another day, another year, and to deal with complications when—and if—they arise.”