To retake the city from ISIS, rival groups need to form an alliance. Can they? By Luke Mogelson.

An entomologist reflects on fly-hunting, an outhouse of distinguished provenance, and the narcissism of collectors. By Fredrik Sjöberg.

Ryan Green is making a game that is as broken—as confounding, unresolved, and tragically beautiful—as the world itself. By Jason Tanz.

How a man accused of million-dollar fraud uncovered a never before seen, secret surveillance device By Russell Brandom.

Alex Ramos was once a contender in boxing's formidable middleweight division. But his toughest fight was for his own name. By William D’Urso.

In the era of comic-book franchises and shrinking profits, an upstart studio wants to reinvent the movie industry. By Tad Friend.

How Bert Schneider, a well-heeled Hollywood producer with a coke problem and a soft spot for radical politics, smuggled Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers who was awaiting trial on a murder charge, into Cuba in 1974. By Joshuah Bearman. (Dec. ’12)

“I had this idea that I could arrive in Macon, Georgia, via rental sedan, nose around for a day or two, and figure something out about the South, and rock music in the South, and men in the South, and men, and death, and guitars, and the Allman Brothers Band, who, in the late 1960s, engineered a new style of rock music that was deeply and earnestly influenced by rhythm & blues but also by something else—some wildness I couldn’t isolate or define or deny.” By Amanda Petrusich.

Her first book, ‘On the Run' — about the lives of young black men in West Philadelphia — has fueled a fight within sociology over who gets to speak for whom. By Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

When massively multiplayer online games go offline, they reveal glimpses of the apocalypse. By Will Partin.

Over the past year, the Globe spent time with an East Boston heroin addict as she navigated the minefield of recovery and the grim prospect of losing her children to the state. Nearly every key moment was witnessed by a Globe reporter or photographer. Brave, broken, loving, at a loss, this is Raquel and her story. By Katie Johnston. (Dec ’15)

Read Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes’ full story of murder, misconduct and justice delayed, on the aftermath of the disclosing of a secret jail-informant network, and of prosecutors withholding evidence following the worst mass shooting in Orange County history.

Why last night's chicken made you sick. By Wil S. Hylton. (Feb. ’15)

An autopsy ruled that Phoebe Jonchuck drowned. But that doesn’t explain why she died. By Lane DeGregory,

I write comedy, so jokes became my DEFCON when I thought my boyfriend might hurt me. By Julieanne Smolinski

Boundaries of Gender: Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask. By Alexander Chee. (Mar. ’15)

Stifled by the Kremlin’s impositions on free speech, I quit my job as editor of the Russian GQ and found freedom in cinema — sort of. By Michael Idov.

Stan Eury turned an obscure bit of immigration law into a mammoth federal program — and a lucrative business empire, importing tens of thousands of Mexican workers for legal American jobs. Except that some of the jobs weren’t real jobs, and an untold number of those workers may never have returned to Mexico at all.

A [Connecticut] special-victims unit fights the hidden epidemic of sexual assault that is disturbingly difficult to investigate. By Kathy Dobie.

Some residents love them; others loathe them. The latter sentiment likely explains why so many peafowl have turned up dead in the past few years. Mike Kessler investigates.