On 13 May 2012, friends of Dana Dirr, a 35-year-old surgeon in Saskatchewan, were greeted with a distressing message when they logged into Facebook: “URGENT PRAYERS NEEDED.” A post written by Dirr’s father informed her friends that Dana was fighting for her life after a head-on car accident. Dana had been airlifted to the very same trauma centre where she worked as a surgeon; in fact, she was meant to be on duty that night.

Mike Love bounds up the stairs inside his massive Lake Tahoe home (10 bedrooms in all, 12 bathrooms, two elevators, not to be believed) and into a large walk-in closet stuffed to overflowing with garish, multicolored shirts and a gazillion baseball caps, many of them emblazoned with the name of his band, the Beach Boys. A suitcase rests on the floor. Love nods at it, prods it with his foot. "A lot more shirts are in there," he says...

The pounding noise shatters the ancient, eerie silence of the Davis Strait, a frigid finger of ocean separating Canada and Greenland. Thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack. It comes from above but the marine fog is thick, the source invisible. The sound gets closer, louder. THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK. The pilot wears an old red neoprene survival suit. But it's hot in the helicopter, and the bulky outfit's mittens...

Noela Rukundo sat in a car outside her home in Melbourne, Australia, watching as the last few mourners filed out. They were leaving a funeral — her funeral. Finally, she spotted the man she’d been waiting for. She stepped out of her car, and her husband put his hands on his head in horror. “Is it my eyes?” she recalled him saying. “Is it a ghost?” “Surprise! I’m still alive!” she replied.

The consequences of driving under the influence have become a sobering reality for a Tacoma family. Cortney Spencer, 29, suffered life-altering injuries when he was hit by an accused drunk driver at East 38th Street and Pacific Avenue in Tacoma around midnight on January 5th. Spencer was standing behind his disabled car when the driver plowed into him. "My life was changed in a blink of an eye," said Spencer. "I saw the headlights, I blinked my eyes...

Though India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it faces a persistent scourge of poverty-related diseases, due in part to poor water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices. About half of India’s population, or 595 million people, still defecates outside and not in a bathroom. Nearly as many people are at risk for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), a group of parasitic and bacterial infections that includes intestinal worms and elephantiasis.

“Jeff” is a technician and carpenter who has been installing art in galleries and private residences for almost a decade. “Andy” is a sound and lighting expert who freelances for galleries, artists and wealthy clients. “Damien” is veteran of the job who currently works as a preparator at a major uptown gallery.

Earlier this year, I legally became an Esparza, five years after they took me in. It took five years for me to realize that these people were serious about being my parents; five years of doubting their love, but yearning for what they claimed to offer. We had to go to court and wear dresses and ties — it was kind of like a marriage. When I entered the building my body immediately tensed up, and my mom put her hand on the small of my back. We walked into the courtroom where...

I woke up driving an eighteen-wheeler 60 miles per hour through a field east of Amarillo, Texas. My partner was screaming as he bounced around in the back; he had just woken up, too. Everything in the truck rattled and shook. Baggage rained down on me from the upper bunk. The view a dark blur, I slammed on the brakes, but 80,000 pounds of inertia wasn't going to stop for air brakes.

It was around 3 in the afternoon when Sherdrick Koffa spotted, in neatly written script, the name on the body bag that he was preparing to set ablaze. It was the name of a classmate. The two grew up together, had played together as children. Now, only a few days into his job burning the Ebola dead, work that had already estranged Mr. Koffa from his family, he was expected to burn the body of his friend.

A woman who was buried alive by her fiancé managed to claw her way out of her shallow grave. Stacey Gwilliam, 34 thought she was going to die after she had been attacked by Keith Hughes, 39 and covered by undergrowth and branches. She said when she woke up in darkness and felt paralysed.

Things got weird, as they so often do, in a Walmart parking lot. Amarillo has three such behemoths, and on a bright, noticeably warm February day, seven of us had gathered at the 42nd Avenue store. The group—a small gaggle including some state and local media types—was packed into an enclosed cargo trailer parked at the far edge of the lot’s constellation of lampposts, that twilight zone where none but runaways, criminals, and budget travelers dare...

In September 1992, two Israeli widows went to the home of their lawyer. When the women arrived, the lawyer told them that he had received some photographs during his recent trip to Munich but that he did not think they should view them. When they insisted, he urged them to let him call a doctor who could be present when they did.

On Sept. 6, I locked myself out of my apartment in Santa Monica, Calif. I was in a rush to get to my weekly soccer game, so I decided to go enjoy the game and deal with the lock afterward. A few hours and a visit from a locksmith later, I was inside my apartment and slipping off my shoes when I heard a man’s voice and what sounded like a small dog whimpering outside, near my front window. I imagined a loiterer and opened the door to move him along.

I was 13 years-old before I first asked my grandfather what he did in the Second World War. Charged with finding a veteran to interview for a history project at school, and armed with the knowledge he’d been a Royal Marine, I ambushed him during a visit to our house in Suffolk. Up until that point, I could barely imagine Grandpa sporting anything other than a cravat, blue jumper and thick-rimmed glasses. If asked to describe him I would probably have said...

Two decades ago, a 41-year-old patient in a psychiatric hospital made a shocking confession. Sture Bergwall stunned his therapist by admitting he was responsible for one of Sweden's most notorious unsolved murders, that of 11-year-old Johan Asplund, who had vanished on his way to school in 1980 and whose body had never been found. Police were called to interview Bergwall, but that was not the end of his disturbing mea culpa.

Silvestre Segovia had vowed many times over that he would never return to solitary confinement. Languishing in the vast Texas prison system's solitary confinement wings for more than a decade had exacted a heavy emotional toll. And there was so much to discover about a new world that confronted him on a much-anticipated exit that chilly morning, Nov. 15, 2002. A loyal girlfriend waited 255 miles away. There might even be a market for the catalog...

Diana Kim has spent the past 12 years photographing people living on the streets of Hawaii. But her project to humanise homelessness suddenly became very personal when her own father ended up living rough. Kim, a law student, explains how, in an effort to save him, she turned her camera on him. My father introduced me to photography. He was a landscape photographer and I remember my early years sitting...

In the United Arab Emirates, migrant women are routinely jailed for having sex outside marriage. Desperate to leave the country, one Filipina maid who was raped found a dramatic way to escape. There wasn't much in the village Monica left behind. No clinic, no school, no street lights - just a crossing of dirt roads and a few concrete houses roofed with tin. What really troubled her, though, was the lack of prospects.

The man presented an authentic looking European passport and carried European currency from several countries and carried himself in a professional manner but that wasn’t what alerted the authorities. No matter how much they had searched, the Customs agents could not find the European country that had issued him the passport anywhere in their maps. The unheard country of Taured. When they asked the Caucasian man to point on their map where Taured was located, he answered them in fluent Japanese.