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...

“Son, is that you?” Recognizing the weak, shaky voice on the other line, Kevin immediately hangs up the phone. Kevin, the eldest son in his family, defected from North Korea in 1998 when he was 17 years old and is currently a graduate student in South Korea, working odd jobs to save cash to send as remittances to his family, all of whom still reside in North Korea. Several years ago, he sent smart phones to his family so that they could stay in touch.

In July 2014, Staffan de Mistura, a 68-year old Italian-Swedish diplomat, was enjoying a peaceful semi-retirement on the isle of Capri when he received a telephone call from his former boss, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, offering him what might be the world’s most difficult job. De Mistura had worked under Ban as the chief of the UN missions to Afghanistan and Iraq, and he was now being asked to take up a role as the UN’s special envoy...

As the Thunder, a trawler considered the world’s most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes. In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes — the captain’s logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery 200-pound fish.

Titus O'Neil is a large man. He also appears to be a kind man.

There are times when Dan Price feels as if he stumbled into the middle of the street with a flag and found himself at the head of a parade. Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn’t thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said.

Four years ago, she introduced the world to the most hated (and maddeningly unforgettable) song in a generation, was passed over by the music industry, and turned into a punchline — all before she was old enough for a learner’s permit. Now 18, Rebecca Black is too famous to be normal and too normal to be famous. So what does she have to smile about?

It’s been almost a month on the road now. One of the goals of Connected States was to see what lessons could be gleaned from a mobile lifestyle and then applied to a life more stationary. Well, 25 days isn’t so long in the grand scheme of things, especially if I’m staring down the barrel of another 340 or so, but it’s been long enough to make an observation or two.

Hazem Sedda is probably the most popular man in Redfern.