For more than a decade,it was Michelle Lyons’s job to observe the final moments of death row inmates—but watching 278 executions did not come without a cost.

“It was there that Nancy and Louis fell in love not only with each other, but also with Afghanistan itself. The country was as exceptional and difficult as they were—and when it descended into chaos, they had no choice but to follow it.”

The examination to become a London cabby is possibly the most difficult test in the world — demanding years of study to memorize the labyrinthine city’s 25,000 streets and any business or landmark on them. As GPS and Uber imperil this tradition, is there an argument for learning as an end in itself?

The father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers.

On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.

A sumo wrestling tournament. A failed coup ending in seppuku. A search for a forgotten man. How one writer’s trip to Japan became a journey through oblivion.

For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Life in your nineties.

She tried public appearances. She tried being reclusive. She tried leaving the country, and she tried finding a job. But the epic humiliation of 1998, when her affair with Bill Clinton became an all-consuming story, has followed Monica Lewinsky every day. After 10 years of self-imposed reticence, and now hoping to help victims of Internet shaming, she critiques the culture that put a 24-year-old through the wringer and calls out the feminists who joined the chorus.

A memoir of gay male literature.

“How young were my boys when I moved them to a town, actually not even a town but a hamlet situated inside a town that would, within months, become the site of the largest primary school shooting in the country’s history?”

The story of Rick Wershe, an infamous teenage drug dealer in 1980s Detroit who flew in kilos of cocaine and was arrested at 17. Still incarcerated, Wershe now claims he was working with the FBI all along. Was one of Detroit’s most notorious criminals also one of the feds’ most valuable informants?

The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. A year-long investigation into the numbers.

What it’s like to be gay in Putin’s Russia.

How the world’s most notorious drug lord was captured.

Two years ago, Yasiel Puig fled Cuba in the hands of black-market smugglers. This is the story of how the cost of the defection journey - in money and human lives - shadows him still.

In Bangladesh, one year after the worst accident in the history of the garment industry, recovery remains a fragile process, justice seems elusive, and reform has a long way to go.

“You Palestinians can never see the fucking big picture.”

Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem. But efforts to protect women from a putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men.

Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day.” That’s what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.

“I became an Alzheimer’s caregiver the week of my 29th birthday. It was August 2012, and I was standing at my kitchen counter in Washington when I got a call from a family friend telling me, “We have a problem.” My father had been hospitalized with congestive heart failure. For seven years, he’d been the primary caregiver for his older sister, who had Alzheimer’s disease. Without his oversight, she had followed his hospitalization with one of her own after collapsing in her bedroom from dehydration, or low blood sugar, or both. My 66-year-old aunt was a widow with no children. My father was a divorced bachelor, and I was an only child. They were my responsibility.”

There’s no helpline for pedophiles who want treatment before they act. So a teen with a terrible secret had to find his own way to save himself and others like him.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, show how separate and unequal education is coming back.

An exploration of the psychological elements involved with decision-making when skiing in avalanche terrain.

Paul Scheier lived a full and loving life. So when his cancer returned at age 86, he said no more hospitals, no chemo. He faced the end on his own terms - something that’s not easy to do in America today. But he showed that it can be done.

On a humanitarian crisis in Texas, the deadliest state in the US for undocumented immigrants.

From righteous fury to faux indignation, everything we got mad about in 2014—and how outrage has taken over our lives.

A story not about the Rwandan genocide, but about what came after: about what happens when people who have tried to kill their neighbors have to learn to live as neighbors once more.