On July 8, 2009, the champagne finally flowed. After an intense two-year competition, a consortium led by a Spanish company in severe financial distress learned that its rock-bottom bid of $3.1 billion had won the worldwide competition to build a new set of locks for the historic Panama Canal. The unlikely victors toasted their win at La Vitrola, a sleek restaurant in an upscale neighborhood east of downtown Panama City. Within days, executives of the four-nation consortium, Grupo Unidos por el Canal, flew to Europe to begin planning the project.

On a cool, bright afternoon in late May, Gen X’ers and twentysomethings, grandparents, teenagers, and at least one baby lined up on a narrow sidewalk outside the Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles. Some of them wore suits; others came in T-shirts and jeans. A handful sported bright red, yellow, and blue shirts with a soaring, asymmetric chevron over their hearts. A few had notably pointy ears. They were, unmistakably, Trekkers, or Trekkies, or just, you know, Star Trek fans.

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure.

In 1974 Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris, an act of faith to prevent the death of his friend Lotte Eisner. This is his account of the journey.

A medical marijuana and criminal defense lawyer from Southern California has made himself into the country’s leading defender of hackers. Can he save his clients from the worst law in technology — and themselves? The law offices of Jay Leiderman occupy the third floor of a beige building in an unlovely office park across a busy road from a strip mall that features a martial arts studio, a discount tool mart, and a vape shop called “Vapes!” Here in Ventura, California — known variously as “Ventucky,” “Bakersfield by the sea,” and, per one Urban Dictionary entry, “the armpit between Santa Barbara and Malibu” — the locals tend to...

Almost once a day last year, on average, a shooting in the United States left at least four people dead or wounded. In May, we wrote about this drumbeat of gunplay. Today we turn to some of the 100-plus innocent bystanders among the 1,792 casualties.

Why did this man travel 200 miles to die here?

The young man was having sex with his dog. In fact, he’d lost his virginity to it. Their relationship was still very good; the dog didn’t seem to mind at all. But the man’s conscience was eating at him. Was he acting immorally? In search of sage counsel, he sent an email to David Pizarro, who teaches a class on moral psychology at Cornell University in New York. ‘I thought he was just pulling my leg,’ said Pizarro. He sent the man a link to an article about bestiality, and thought that would be the end of it. But the man responded with more questions. ‘I realised this kid was pretty serious.’

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization.

It was a late summer morning when Robert “Fat Daddy” Taylor woke up, smoked two blunts, and decided to turn himself in. He’d been on the run for four days, and it seemed that everywhere he went in and around the 7 Mile neighborhood on the east side of Detroit, there were photos of him in stores, and people quick to call the police, to claim the $1,000 reward for finding him. “The streets talk,” Taylor told me recently. “Everybody was telling me, ‘Yo, Fats, man, those boys trying to get you.’ I couldn’t go nowhere. [The police] was everywhere.”

On December 19, 2013, after a groundbreaking ACLU report that detailed the harsh realities for inmates sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent offenses, President Barack Obama granted clemency to eight federal inmates now known as “Obama’s Eight.” The group was the first wave of inmates to have their sentences commuted by Obama. Jason Hernandez was one of them. Hernandez was once a prominent crack dealer from McKinney. He started out on the street corners of East McKinney at the age of fifteen, learning from his brother J.J., whose escalating crack addiction would propel Hernandez deeper into the drug game.

Thomas Pogge, one of the world’s most prominent ethicists, stands accused of manipulating students to gain sexual advantage. Did the fierce champion of the world's disempowered abuse his own power? By Katie J.M. Baker.

Picture a suburban housewife of the 1950s. Her name is Mrs. John Drone (Mary), and she lives in Rolling Knolls Estates, a new development of what the salesman calls "California Cape Cod Ramblers" on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Whatever knolls might have rolled gently over the land at one time have been flattened for muddy streets of two-bedroom houses, named after famous conflicts of World War II.

In 1941, a young married couple embarked for Africa on the S.S. Robin Moore. All did not go as planned, and the voyage of the American cargo ship inadvertently shaped U.S. history.

A cheating ring at the University of Iowa demonstrates the damage being done by a booming Chinese cottage industry to the U.S. higher education system.

A new company is bringing the engineering savvy of rocket science to the design of women's shoes. But can high heels that are actually comfortable to wear change centuries’ worth of symbolism? 

40 years later: The feuds, failures and breakdowns of the band that launched punk rock.

The U.S. government says it has finally put an end to what investigators call one of the longest running mail frauds in history. The scheme preyed on sick, elderly and vulnerable Americans, promising guidance and talismans from a French psychic named Maria Duval.

All the days are monotone here. You can't get them back, they seem to be erased from life.

The treasure hunters of Lower Silesia, Poland, believe that untold riches lie hidden in abandoned tunnels and bunkers. Could they be right?