At 16, John McAvoy owned a sawn-off shotgun and spent his time doing grunt work... at 18 he was handed two life sentences. Now he’s the only Nike-sponsored Ironman triathlete. He tells Josie Cox his story

The story of David Charles Hahn (1976-2016) is not an ordinary one. The boy, since his early years, was always fascinated with chemistry and science and conducted numerous chemical experiments just for fun. However, no one really expected that one day he would actually build a fully functioning nuclear reactor in his own backyard.

One morning in June, with the smell of an approaching thunderstorm in the air, an elderly man, his hair carefully parted to one side and wearing a freshly ironed, collared shirt, rings the doorbell of a farmhouse in the Bohemian Forest, a low mountain range in the Czech Republic. He has a long journey behind him, across two international borders and hundreds of kilometers, the last few hundred meters of which lead down an alley lined with pear trees.

"When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her." The first and only time I had sex it did not go well. I was twenty-two, a late bloomer by most of popular culture’s standards, and for the year my boyfriend and I had been dating, we’d skirted around the issue. He’d repeated that he was willing to wait, however long it might take me to be ready, and I’d chafed at his understanding...

In residency, there’s a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted until the operating was done, which depended, in part, on how quick you were in the OR.

Robin Rinaldi, a magazine journalist living in San Francisco by way of Scranton, Pa., initially wasn’t sure she wanted children, but she knew that Scott, her stoic Midwestern husband, did not. Over time, Rinaldi decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When Scott opted for a vasectomy, she demanded an open marriage.

The Pole Vault is a singular and uniquely dangerous sport. The people who do it anyway aren't in it for money. They're in it to fly, and because they're a little crazy. Renaud Lavillenie stares down the runway and up at the bar. His eyes seem to bulge, his eyebrows bounce, his head jerks to the left. He could be cracking his neck; it's more likely the Frenchman is thinking, Putain de merde qui est élevé, or, in English, "Holy shit, that's high."

Nobody ever asks me what it felt like. They never ask what it was like to spend three of my teenage years in secure psychiatric units for severe anorexia nervosa; how it felt to be so undernourished I could hardly walk; how it feels now to be able to picture the doctors’ and nurses’ faces more clearly than I can those of my late grandparents; how it feels to have spent my formative years with young women who are now, in so many cases, dead; how this experience changed my personality for ever.

It's strange how you can interact with someone every day and not know anything about them at all. I work in Lebanon much of the year. When I'm there, I stay in the residential Christian neighborhood of Fanar, about 20 minutes outside of Beirut. I see the natour — the superintendent of my building — when I enter or exit. He's a handsome man in his 30s with a quick, easy smile. I knew he was Syrian, but that was the extent of my knowledge about his life.

The digger Elton McDonald grew up on what’s probably the toughest street in Toronto—maybe even Canada—and he still lives there with his mother and two sisters. Three summers ago, a man got shot in the head behind their townhouse. Elton’s sister Anora Graham went to the man’s aid, pressing a shirt she’d run to fetch against the wound. He died two weeks later. Lots of others here have, too. “Elton went to school with kids who are not alive anymore,” says Anora. “They died when they were 16.”

For years, he was called a madman for toiling away on the rocks. But Dashrath Manjhi was not crazy. His quest to break a path through a small mountain to benefit the entire village is now legendary because he carved an entire road with hand tools, working for 22 years.

The first part of this story may be familiar, especially to those in Western Canada. It starts with a group of backcountry skiers venturing into British Columbia’s Glacier National Park in early 2003, and ends with one of the deadliest avalanches in Canadian history. Seven people lost their lives to the slide. Adding to the horror, the victims were schoolkids. Media coverage focused primarily on the deaths of the seven students. Journalists interviewed grieving parents...

I’ve broken this story up into three chapters. It should never have gone this far, but the internet works in mysterious ways. None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s truly crazy.

Danielle Josey Davis had been married only seven months when a devastating motorcycle accident left her husband on life support and in a coma. Doctors recommended letting Matt Davis die because there was a 90 percent chance he would never wake up, but Danielle told ABC News she decided it just wasn't time yet. Then, one day, he woke up.

Adolfo Davis admits he was a swaggering thug by the age of 14 as he roamed and dealt drugs with a South Side gang. He also describes a childhood of emotional and physical deprivation: a mother fixated on crack, an absent father, a grandmother’s overflowing and chaotic apartment. From the age of 6 or 7, he often had to buy his own food or go hungry, so he collected cans, pumped gas for tips and shoplifted.

Dallas Mildenhall used obscure science to crack cases all over the world. Then a murder took place in his own backyard.

For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands.

He’d spent years wondering when the other shoe would drop. The revelation had taken him by surprise — the best possible thing that could have happened under the circumstances, his lawyer said — and yet the promise of it weighed too heavily for him to completely go along with it. Part of him was sure it wasn’t true at all.

Seventeen hundred miles from what is customarily called civilization—in this case, the western shore of the Republic of South Africa—lies a tiny British-run volcanic island populated by fewer than three hundred people who lay claim to living in the most isolated permanent habitation in the world.

If you'd seen him in the crowded room that night, you might not have given him a second look. He was the frail old man in a wheelchair. He wore a black ascot cap, a burgundy tie and a gray tweed jacket that covered his 140-pound frame. Ba Van Nguyen couldn't speak, could barely move; just a tiny man in a roomful of big Navy men swapping war stories.

The women begin to arrive just before 8 a.m., every day and without fail, until there are thickets of young Asian and Hispanic women on nearly every street corner along the main roads of Flushing, Queens. As if on cue, cavalcades of battered Ford Econoline vans grumble to the curbs, and the women jump in. It is the start of another workday for legions of New York City’s manicurists, who are hurtled to nail salons across three states.

McDonald’s sales have slumped. Maybe the public wants healthier food. Maybe there’s too much competition. Maybe people aren’t into the chipotle barbecue snack wrap. McDonald’s leaders have vowed to reverse the downturn by recommitting to “hot, fresh food,” by selling off certain outlets to independent owners — which would reduce the number of corporate-covered employees with a newly raised minimum wage — and by cutting $300 million in costs.

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook, has written an emotional post on the social networking site about mourning for her husband, David Goldberg, who died in an accident last month. “Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband—the first thirty days,” Sandberg wrote. “Judaism calls for a period of intense mourning known as shiva that lasts seven days after a loved one is buried. After shiva, most normal activities can be resumed...

BOB WEIDNER likes to play a game when he goes to a high-end outlet store like Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren: How many things can he buy and not spend more than $100? On his last visit, the answer was seven. “Every year, we go up to the outlets and find a deal,” he said. “It’s worth it.” His wife, Angela Marchi, who chides him for darning his socks (just the toes, not the heels, he said), prefers to buy her clothes twice a year when her favorite stores put last year’s styles on sale.

In 2009, a strange Facebook account appeared out of nowhere and friended people en-masse. The name on the account was Junko Junsui, and she had a message for anyone willing to listen. Thus began a strange mystery that would continue for years to come, as countless people across the internet became enamoured of Junsui, her story, and the shadowy organizations she claimed were hiding in plain sight. It was never real, of course.

For virtually all of the past forty-three years, Albert Woodfox, a sixty-eight-year-old man in poor health, has been in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine-foot cell. He’s allowed out of his cell for an hour each day, to walk his cellblock, shower, or exercise in the yard, while still remaining in isolation. This treatment would be cruel and inhumane regardless of the crime for which Woodfox was convicted.

Sometimes I wonder if I would do it again. That's the funny thing about life. Experience comes in random, sporadic servings. It's only years later that the story takes shape. I didn't intend to spend more than a year covering human trafficking. It ended up taking a decade. I didn't intend on reporting in more than two countries. So, how did I end up in nine?

I have lived in America for the past 15 years. I have two Ivy League degrees. And I am on the verge of deportation. Despite being an "honorary American," as I have often jokingly introduced myself, I am in fact a citizen of New Zealand. I was 18 years old when I first came to America. I still remember the excitement I felt when, very late at night, my flight from Auckland touched down at JFK.

A handful of North Korean defectors are publishing their memoirs this summer. Among the harrowing accounts is “The Girl With Seven Names,” by Hyeonseo Lee, who walked out of the country when she was 17.

After a hospital error, two pairs of Colombian identical twins were raised as two pairs of fraternal twins. This is the story of how they found one another — and of what happened next.

‘She sent me a picture of her adoption records. We had been born in the same clinic. She wrote, “Dude, we’re totally twins!”’

In the latest installment of Hopes&Fears anonymous interview series, we talk to a struggling actor who made a livelihood selling his semen. I’m a professional sperm donor. It kind of started off as a joke. I knew that you could earn money donating sperm. I was trying to make it as an actor. I guess you could say I was a starving artist. I was basically just working a bunch of random part-time jobs to hoard as much funds as I could to pay...

When Boston photographer David Fox moved to Afghanistan, he began to share pictures and stories about the day-to-day life that rarely gets covered by the press.

The line for lawyers and family members to get into Lefortovo prison starts to form around five in the morning. The building, on a quiet street just east of Moscow’s Third Ring Road, now officially belongs to the Ministry of Justice, but it’s still informally known as the prison of the F.S.B., a successor agency to the K.G.B. Early on June 16, 2014, one of the prisoners awaiting visitors was Boris Kolesnikov, a general who had been the deputy head of the...

I met Angelo on a film set in Berlin. We'd both been booked for a German TV commercial. The producers were worried that the all blond-haired, blue-eyed cast would send out the wrong message, so they'd done a last-minute search of out-of-work non-German actors in the city and found Angelo, a black Canadian, and me, a ginger Paddy. There was a lot of downtime on the shoot, so Angelo and I got to talking. But our conversations kept getting interrupted...