On April 20, 2010, BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. Over the next 87 days, it gushed at least 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the worst human-made environmental disaster in US history and afflicting the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

The Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC), slated to launch "later this year," looks almost incomplete at first glance. The clean, confusing-looking slab, nearly the length and width of an Xbox One S, has no joysticks. The usual selection of Xbox inputs has been reduced down to a few menu buttons, a D-pad, and two black, hand-sized pads.

“True Evil has a face you know and a voice you trust.”

The long read: ‘Natural wine’ advocates say everything about the modern industry is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong – and have triggered the biggest split in the wine world for a generation

In the closing weeks of 2008, the US Department of Energy invited politicians and press to a dedication ceremony for the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. The state-of-the-art lab, backed by $125 million in federal funding, filled the top floor of a glimmering glass office building that reflected the grand hopes for advanced biofuels.

The long read: This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine

Shivam Kumar’s failing eyesight was manageable at first. To better see the chalkboard, the 12-year-old moved to the front of the classroom, but in time, the indignities piled up. Increasingly blurry vision forced him to give up flying kites and then cricket, after he was repeatedly whacked by balls he could no longer see. The constant squinting gave him headaches, and he came to dread walking home from school.

In 2006, a rookie FBI agent was tasked with unraveling a murder conspiracy in America's most secure prison—home to the Unabomber, international terrorists, and drug kingpins. A story of brutality, isolation, and loyalty, by Chris Outcalt for The Atavist

If we keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, global warming will eventually melt all the ice at the poles and on mountaintops, raising sea level by 216 feet. Explore what the world’s new coastlines would look like.

What are human beings capable of when it feels as if the world is about to end?

A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner. Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension. It is $76,111. Per month. That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year. Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster.

South of fallujah’s Route Fran were hundreds of insurgents who’d spent months digging trench lines, emplacing roadside bombs, barricading streets, training with their weapons, reading the Koran, and watching videos of suicide bombers to inspire them for the fight to come. North of Route Fran were the roughly 1,000 men of 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, preparing themselves for the assault. Route Fran itself was a wide, four-lane highway. On November 9, 2004, the highway was wet—it’d rained the previous day—and the sky was gray and foreboding.

Jordan Peterson really takes his time setting up his punching bag for the audience at the University of British Columbia’s ‘Free Speech Club’: “I want to talk about intersectionality and white privilege a bit.” The audience whoops and giggles, anticipating exactly what Jordan Peterson will say. It’s the third time he has spoken at the ‘Free Speech Club’ (Nov, 2017) and he’s delivered the same talk, Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege, to neoconservative powerbrokers at the Sovereign Nations conference (Trump Hotel, Washington, 2018).

An incarcerated journalist reports on the impact of surveillance on a culture of violence.

Two Australian Taxation Office whistleblowers have told a joint Four Corners and Fairfax investigation about a toxic internal culture where vulnerable small businesses and individuals are deliberately targeted to help meet revenue goals. They allege unethical tactics are used for revenue raising, at the expense of correct procedure and fairness to taxpayers. ATO debt collection officer Richard Boyle has told Four Corners that last year some staff were instructed to seize funds from the bank accounts of taxpayers assessed to owe the Tax Office money, regardless of their personal circumstances.

When he was 13, three white teenage boys beat Benny Ivey. They aimed for his chest as his back pressed against the wall of his friend’s house in Florence, Mississippi. The skinny blond adolescent had to show he was tough enough to become a Black Gangster Disciple. It was 1989, the height of the crack era, and many white kids wanted to join black gangs that did not welcome them, so they initiated each other into home-grown copycat versions.

Inside one of America's most corrupt police squads.

n 2012, Josh Richards was not a soldier, or a miner, or a Mars One hopeful. He was Keith, the Anger Management Koala. The bit was exactly what it sounds like. Richards — who describes himself as a “short, obnoxious, ginger Australian” — would dress up as his country’s most notorious marsupial and swear at a live audience. A former soldier-turned-traveling comic, he says being Keith was oddly therapeutic.

If you ask Google whether it has a discrimination problem, the company might point you to its industry-leading diversity efforts or its program for responding to complaints. But employees who challenge that narrative by asserting that it has created anything but a healthy, supportive environment are being labeled troublemakers and, in some instances, pushed out of the company. Today, Google faces so many of these troublemakers that it can no longer simply shrug them off, even if its every instinct is to do just that.

Eric Dorsey, a 62-year-old engineer in Palo Alto, was watching TV Tuesday night when he started getting texts that Stephen Hawking had died. He turned on the news and saw clips of the famed physicist speaking in his iconic android voice — the voice that Dorsey had spent so much time as a young man helping to create, and then, much later, to save from destruction.