The story of an 80-year-old hoax.

What Kanye West really wants.

An optimistic argument for the United States.

“If you think the mission your country keeps sending you on is pointless or impossible and that you’re only deploying to protect your brothers and sisters in arms from danger, then it’s not the Taliban or al-Qaeda or isis that’s trying to kill you, it’s America.”

How Germany sorts people fleeing death from opportunists and pretenders.

For years he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then his victims banded together to take him down.

Humanity has 30 years to find out.

A new kind of late capitalism.

Examining the state’s campaign to grant clemency and restore civil rights.

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

A prescient case for W. Mark Felt as journalism’s most famous leaker.

Inside the Vice President’s gamble on Donald Trump.

How a cartel invented and marketed the modern diamond.

“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 Andrew Anglin went from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll.

Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life.

As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn’t have a dad, so the mother rented me. I’ve acted as the girl’s father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.

The country’s elites are desperate to figure out what they got wrong in 2016. But can they handle the truth?

Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet—and then she found love with the model whose photographs he had stolen.

The Western Hemisphere before Columbus.

Tim Piazza fought for his life for 12 hours before his Beta Theta Pi brothers called 911. By then, it was too late.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

How did Josh Tetrick’s vegan-mayo company become a Silicon Valley darling—and what is he really selling?

Memories from journalists he mentored.