How Mandela’s political heirs grow rich off corruption.

“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.”

Thousands of internal documents help explain how, through brutality and bureaucracy, the Islamic State stayed in power for so long.

In his work with the White House, is Mohammed bin Salman driving out extremism, or merely seizing power for himself?

On the floating villages of the Mekong River and the ethnic Vietnamese who have populated them for generations and are still considered “foreigners” by their Cambodian neighbors.

On the road with the world’s greatest hitchhiker.

How Germany sorts people fleeing death from opportunists and pretenders.

Russians will be going to the polls on March 18, but it is already clear who will emerge victorious. Vladimir Putin has been at the helm for almost 20 years – both dramatically changing his country and subjugating it at the same time.

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.