On being gay in the military, three years before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Meet Faygele ben Miriam (formerly John Singer), the radical activist “beyond the leading edge” of the same-sex marriage fight.

A conservative case for gay marriage.

In 1920, Harvard University officials suspected that some students were gay. So they kicked them all out.

The activists, politicians, and social trends that led to 2012’s gay marriage victories.

As tens of thousands come out of the closet, gay political activism heats up.

A profile of Maggie Gallagher, founder of National Organization for Marriage.

Erwynn Umali, Will Behrens, and the first gay wedding on a military base.

The writer on his father’s religious devotion to personal style.

On the talent, ego, and late father of Bryant Gumbel.

“My father didn’t believe in things that were a reminder of the past because he had never had things in the past, and, more important, he had never had a past—not a past that mattered, that should be passed on to me, his son.”

A melancholic Billy Ray Cyrus on the trauma of being the father of a famous 18-year-old girl, his friendship with Kurt Cobain, and his favorite mullet nicknames (Kentucky Waterfall and Missouri Compromise).

An essay on African-American fatherhood.

Dominick Dunne’s account of the trial of his daughter’s murderer.

Swept out to sea by a riptide, a father and his 12-year-old autistic son struggle to stay alive. As night falls, the dad comes to a devastating realization: If they remain together, they’ll drown together.

How a Mexican drug cartel makes its billions.

Scott Storch, a producer who earned six figures for beats he made in less than an hour, was worth an estimated $70 million. Then he blew it all in a bizarre cocaine binge.

The rise and fall of the Black Mafia Family, once one of the largest cocaine empires in American history.

A profile of Gil-Scott Heron.

How the bulk of the cocaine entering the U.S. ends up cut with a cattle dewormer.

A profile of Griselda Blanco, aka the “Black Widow,” who pioneered the cocaine trade in New York and Miami.

Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and the making of The Blues Brothers.

Customer feedback on the New York City coke dealing industry.

Two aggressive Dallas cops. One confidential informant. Hundreds of pounds of cocaine. Fifty-three drug traffickers busted. Sound too good to be true? It was.

The murderous tale of Washington D.C. fabulist Albrecht Muth and his late wife Viola Drath.

A wedding photographer catches up with his past clients.

Erwynn Umali, Will Behrens and the first gay wedding on a military base.

The marriage and divorce that bankrupted the Dodgers.

In an Oklahoma City neighborhood usually left off city maps, the federal government is implementing its $300 million anti-poverty plan: teaching poor Americans how to get married.

The dissolution of Brooklyn softcore skin-mag Jacques and the marriage of the couple that created it.

The frenzied few days before the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

In 1916, a down-on-its-luck traveling circus hung its star elephant. The crime? Murder.

The similarities between the reactions of elephants and humans to childhood trauma.

On imperialism, doubt and a day in colonial Burma.

Is it ever OK for zoos to display elephants? And if not, what should keepers do with them?

Nearly everything you could want to know about elephants, plus the metaphysical questions the animals raise about our own consciousness.

Riding rescued elephants through a wildlife park.

On August 13, 1986, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed. His nightmare had only begun.

During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfull imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: Someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.

The miracle of the great Zanesville zoo escape—which began last fall when a depressed, desperate man named Terry Thompson set free his vast collection of exotic animals—was that not a single innocent person was hurt. The incident made global news. It also thrust into daylight, if only for a brief moment, a secret world of privately owned exotic animals living off the grid, and often right next door. We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things are—and what the hell they’re doing there.

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

In 2011 the Legislature slashed funding for women’s health programs and launched an all-out war on Planned Parenthood that has dramatically changed the state’s priorities. A year later, the battle is still raging, and the stakes could not be higher.

Inside Moammar Gadhafi’s secret surveillance network.

Breakneck growth has made China an economic miracle. But will the destruction of families prove to be too high a cost?

How the museum-quality 55,000 film collection that an East Village video store gave away ended up in a small, possibly mob-run village in Sicily.

The Kabul hospital that treats all sides.

Swift acceptance of gays by the Israeli military helped transform Israel into one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world.

A profile of the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker.

Unexploded ammunition near U.S. firing range poses peril for Afghans.

An investigation into slavery in Mauritania.

Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.

In 1982, the Guatemalan military massacred the villagers of Dos Erres, killing more than 200 people. Thirty years later, a Guatemalan living in the US got a phone call from a woman who told him that two boys had been abducted during the massacre – and he was one of them.

See also: “Finding Oscar” (Sebastian Rotella, Ana Arana • ProPublica, Fundación MEPI)

In 1982, the Guatemalan military massacred the villagers of Dos Erres, killing more than 200 people. Thirty years later, a Guatemalan living in the US got a phone call from a woman who told him that two boys had been abducted during the massacre – and he was one of them.

See also: “Finding Oscar” (Sebastian Rotella, Ana Arana • ProPublica, Fundación MEPI)

“Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. Then I went inside America’s prisons.”

How personal information may be used to target you with online ads.

An amateur linguist loses control of his creation.

Repetitive motions and no breaks can cause lifelong problems.

Each year, some 4,500 American workers die on the job and 50,000 perish from occupational diseases. Millions more are hurt and sickened at workplaces, and many others are cheated of wages and abused. A series exploring threats to workers—and the corporate and regulatory factors that endanger them.

A profile of a General Motors CEO Mark Reuss.

In the waning days of summer, at hospitals scattered across the country, teams of physicians faced the same mystery — patients with life-threatening infections with an unknown cause. Ultimately, they would discover that these seemingly isolated cases were the leading edge of an unprecedented outbreak of a rare fungal meningitis.

On the struggle for justice and a place to call home.

On the first presidential debate.

Mementos left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the man in charge of cataloging them.

Army Spc. Erik Schei was shot in the head in Iraq. This is the story of his recovery.

Analysis of a decade of federal data shows general public detected far more spills than leak detection technology.

Frozen fish from the supermarket often has excess ice — and consumers pay the price.

Inside New Jersey’s halfway houses.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, California lawmakers sought a way to channel the patriotic fervor and use it to help victims, families and law enforcement. Their answer: Specialty memorial license plates emblazoned with the words, “We Will Never Forget.”

The anatomy of a sex abuse scandal at a Christian school in Oklahoma.

Police force fails to protect the state’s most vulnerable residents.

A son’s secret brings a Southern Baptist minister to his knees.

How Earl Eugene Mawyer got a chance to be a hero.

On the “toxic legacy” of Anniston, Alabama.

At 24, Ray Wauson was thrilled to land a job as an armored-car guard. But he was entering an unregulated world in which the people guarding the cargo are often defenseless against the cargo itself.

How faulty data lowered Milwaukee’s crime rate.

City cameras track anyone, even Minneapolis Mayor Rybak.

On homeless sex offenders in metro Phoenix.

A year-long examination of the abuse investigations of unlicensed youth reform programs that operate in Florida and are overseen by the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a private, nonprofit group.

Finalists:
“Never Let Go” (Kelly Benham • Tampa Bay Times)
“Life of a Salesman” (Eli Saslow • Washington Post)

Finalists:
“Playing With Fire” (Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe, Michael Hawthorne • Chicago Tribune)
“In God’s Name: Unlicensed Religious Group Homes in Florida” (Alexandra Zayas • Tampa Bay Times)

Finalists:
“Deep Trouble: A High-Tech Hunt for Asian Carp” (Dan Egan • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
“Storm of Money: Hurricanes, Insurance, and the Black Boxes That Determine How Much You Pay” (Tony Bartelme • The Post and Courier)

Finalists:
“The Meningitis Outbreak” (Liz Kowalczyk, Carolyn Johnson, Todd Wallack, Patricia Wen, Kay Lazar • Boston Globe)
“The Permanent War: Behind the U.S. Targeted Killing Program” (Craig Whitlock, Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung, Julie Tate • Washington Post)

Finalists:
“Prognosis: Profits” (Ames Alexander, Karen Garloch, Joseph Neff, David Raynor • The Charlotte Observer, The News and Observer)
“FAMU Hazing Investigation “ (David Breen, Stephen Hudak, Jeff Kunerth, Denise-Marie Ordway • Orlando Sentinel)

His sprawling, confessional essay about spending more than $600,000 on expensive, and often bizarre, leather clothing.

Before the show, before the movie, there was Bissinger’s tale of the 1988 Permian Panther football team and the small West Texas city of Odessa, where he lived with a family for a year.

The story of eight gay men in Texas murdered by teenage boys.

At 25, Stephen Glass was a reporter wunderkind, regularly filing incredible pieces for the largest magazines. When suspicion fell on his sources, things started to really get strange. It wasn’t just sources and organizations he was inventing, but whole stories.

After one of the most decisive wins in Kentucky Derby history, Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, ending a promising career and beginning a herculean effort to save his life.

On the retaliation ethics of baseball.

A profile of Bissinger as he returned to his old stomping grounds, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A murder case in Los Angeles, cold since the late ’80s, heats up thanks to breakthroughs in forensic science and leads detectives to one of their own.

The rise and fall of the Seven-Seven—stationed in the war zone of 1980’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn—and how an idealistic young recruit became part of cash-snatching, drug-reselling, renegade clique of cops.

Rogue cops in the LAPD Rampart division’s anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) were involved in everything from drug smuggling and bank robberies to, allegedly, the murder of Notorious BIG.

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

How the New Orleans Police Department failed during Hurricane Katrina.

In 2008, a Brooklyn cop grew gravely concerned about how the public was being served. So he began carrying a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.

It can’t be all bad! Here’s the story of a group that posed as cops and built “most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history” before the law enforcement took them down.

The author takes time off from teaching to aid her autistic son.

A young girl cares for her mother after a stroke.

How old is too old to get pregnant?

On the complicated process of surrogacy and the many definitions of “mother.”

To some people’s ire, pregnant women are exercising more personal judgment about alcohol consumption.

The author interviews her mother about life as a secretary at Playboy in 1960s New York City.

An excerpt from his book on the 1988 presidential campaign, one of the great pieces of political reporting in American history.

Cramer’s most famous piece of writing, a profile of an aging Ted Williams.

How Jerry Lee Lewis, whose nickname was “The Killer,” got away with murdering 25-year-old Shawn Michelle Stevens, his fifth wife.

Cramer on his hometown of Baltimore and its hero, Cal Ripken Jr.

A profile of a Montana sheriff in the midst of a manhunt.

On the psychological considerations behind breast augmentation.

During World War I, surgeon Harold Gillies and sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd created masks for disfigured soldiers. Gillies’ work, especially, served as the basis for modern surgical techniques.

A profile of the controversial “Dr. Schnoz,” author of My Beautiful Mommy, a children’s book about plastic surgery, and the doctor behind “Operation Chuppah,” which gave Orthodox Jewish women free nose jobs to attract husbands.

After learning that his twin girls will be born with cleft palates, Chernoff and his wife begin the long process of preparing for corrective surgery.

Plastic surgery on the parts most people don’t see.

Last fall, one of Spain’s greatest matadors took a horn to the face. It was a brutal goring, among the most horrific in the history of bullfighting. Miraculously, Juan Jose Padilla was back in the bullring—sí, fighting bulls—a mere five months later. And in the process of losing half his sight, he somehow managed to double his vision.

On his first tour of duty in Afghanistan, Sam Brown was set on fire by an improvised explosive device. He survived, only to find himself, like thousands of other vets, doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. Even hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, and little hope.

Then his doctors told him about an experimental treatment, a painkilling video game supposedly more effective than morphine. If successful, it would deliver Brown from his living hell into a strange new world—a digital winter wonderland.

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

A troubled Iraq veteran seeks out the family he harmed.

On August 13, 1986, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed. His nightmare had only begun.

During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfull imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: Someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.

Kim Dotcom is not a pirate. Kim Dotcom is a pirate.

[Requires Subscription] The gripping true story of three close friends—Tom, Ian, and Jimmy—whose courage is challenged every day as they walk the Afghan countryside with their fellow Marines, patrolling for cleverly hidden explosives that can instantly tear a man in half.

Lawbreakers, Lawmakers: In some parts of Chicago, violent street gangs and pols quietly trade money and favors for mutual gain. The thugs flourish, the elected officials thrive—and you lose.

The miracle of the great Zanesville zoo escape—which began last fall when a depressed, desperate man named Terry Thompson set free his vast collection of exotic animals—was that not a single innocent person was hurt. The incident made global news. It also thrust into daylight, if only for a brief moment, a secret world of privately owned exotic animals living off the grid, and often right next door. We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things are—and what the hell they’re doing there.

The future of Libya depends on mercy or revenge.

On the front lines of a burgeoning civil war.

On October 3, 2006, a four-year-old boy named Andrew Burd died in a Corpus Christi hospital. The cause of death was determined to be salt poisoning, an extremely unusual occurrence. Even more shocking was what happened next: his foster mother, Hannah Overton, was found guilty of killing him. But could she really have done what the prosecutors say?

Who’s killing the people of the Juarez Valley?

Election night in Peru.

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

The real war on women is in the Middle East.

The era of medical miracles has created a new phase of aging, as far from living as it is from dying. A son’s plea to let his mother go.

[Requires Subscription] What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first.

Does success spell doom for Homo sapiens?

For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

How much is too much? Federal limits don’t exist.

Our findings show a real need for federal standards for this toxin.

Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.

In Michele Bachmann’s home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

In 2011 the Legislature slashed funding for women’s health programs and launched an all-out war on Planned Parenthood that has dramatically changed the state’s priorities. A year later, the battle is still raging, and the stakes could not be higher.

John McCain

John Kerry

Al Gore

Bob Dole

George H.W. Bush

George McGovern

One of the earliest in-depth reports on climate change, Revkin’s piece introduced many to the issue—and to the challenges of addressing it.

The perilous existence of the world’s glaciers, “global warming’s ticking time bomb.”

Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?

On the possibilities of geo-engineering.

The story of how Washington blew its best shot to do something on climate change.

Inside the increasingly hostile global-warming debate.

A primer on climate change economics.

The story of a small town just outside Pittsburgh that has suffered through a half-century of economic decline, racial tension, and endless crime. Despite that trajectory, or perhaps because of it, Aliquippa has also produced an astounding number of NFL players.

On accent, culture, and a legendary football announcer.

On the impact of steel giant, Andrew Carnegie.

The possible resurrection of a Pittsburgh borough.

A profile of one of Mr. Rogers, who got his start at Pittsburgh’s WQED station and filmed there from 1968 until his final show.

Love, Margaret Thatcher and a broken penis.

The case of the disappearing penis.

How Steve Warshak made millions selling “natural male enhancement” and lost it all.

Meet the medical men who made John Bobbitt whole.

In 1967, Dr. John Money transformed a baby boy into a baby girl. For decades, he touted the case as a success. It wasn’t.

A look at the foreskin restoration movement.

The story of soldiers who served their country and paid a horrible price.

When Christian music and ’90s mainstream rock collided.

A report from America’s biggest Christian music festival.

A Christian rock star questions his faith.

Dylan talks faith, music and politics.

A puzzling confession from an unlikely band.