My legions sprung to action the moment the digital analog of a starting gun fired. Strangers around the globe frantically dragged-and-dropped scanned shreds of paper on a virtual canvas, racing to reconstruct a shredded document.

When it comes to treating pain and chronic disease, many doctors are turning to treatments like acupuncture and meditation—but using them as part of a larger, integrative approach to health. 

Is it time for American actors to take a hard look in the mirror? Earlier this year Michael Douglas mused darkly to a magazine interviewer, “I think we have a little crisis going on amongst our young actors at this point,” and Spike Lee, commenting on the “invasion” of black British actors, had some pithy observations on the subject, too...

Andrea and I sat cramped around a little two-top table at a Starbucks near her apartment, materials from her U.S. government class spread out before us. The handouts were photocopied news articles about teenagers pursuing The American Dream, the topic of an essay Andrea was writing. There was the Somali “Lost Boy” and his remarkable rise from child soldier to U.S. college student; there was a young woman who escaped the Taliban and made it to a U.S. high school, then college on a scholarship.

On eBay, do a search for “haunted” and you’ll get dozens of dolls, boxes, crystals, Ouija boards, and other pieces of regular-looking furniture that contain a little something extra special inside of them. These items are hawked by a slew of sellers, from full-fledged businesses that specialize in only selling ghost-enhanced artifacts, to regular folks who just want Uncle Wally’s old stuffed animal out of the house.

What responsibility does the artist have to society? Speaking at Amherst College in 1963, John F. Kennedy gave one answer to that perpetually nagging question. For a politician it was a highly unusual one, though perhaps less so then than now. “Society must set the artist free,” Kennedy declared, “to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

The scientist and bestselling writer has become the face of a new crusading atheism. But even his closest allies worry that his online provocations do more harm than good

The story of a rapidly expanding industry that has little reason to exist, except the clearest reason in the world.

On Sept. 13, 2005, Nick Yee died. A few moments later, he came back to life. Then he died again. And he wasn’t the only one. His city was littered with bodies, bones scattered across the floor of the auction house and town square. “It was simply hilarious,” he said, “that everyone was dying and no one was sure what was happening.”

Three years ago I walked out of my house and put a .32 pistol to my head.” Jared Allen, a property manager from Idaho, chokes up as he tells this story, a tear running down his weathered face. Jared didn’t kill himself that day. He fell to the ground and begged the Lord for help, and soon, his brother-in-law arrived from Canada with a dietary supplement he had designed, EMPowerplus Q96.

By the time Cornelis Drebbel built an oven with a simple thermostat, one of the first manmade feedback mechanisms in history, in the 1620s, he was regarded in Europe as a magisterial, if not mad, inventor.

The winning words are often richly onomatopoeic: clarty (muddy), dunderknowle (idiot), nesh (fragile), and others.

If you knew where a million dollars' worth of blow was buried, would you go dig it up? Rodney Hyden would. We pick up the story at this critical juncture.

In the 1960s, hundreds of pounds of uranium went missing in Pennsylvania. Is it buried in the ground, poisoning locals—or did Israel steal it to build the bomb?

As we toured the finishing department, Nancy DiBella, Rochester Film Finishing Operations Manager for Kodak, pointed out the role of each machine and person we passed. She wore a white lab coat and protective glasses, speaking with a quiet modesty that the other workers shared. I asked DiBella if she gets the chance to see movies shot on the film that goes through her hands. “If I know it’s on print, I’ll go see the movie”, she said. “Even if it’s bad.”

The Pigeon King delivered his closing statement to the jury dressed in his only suit. His name was Arlan Galbraith, and he was representing himself. He had abruptly fired his lawyer nearly two years earlier, during the long lead up to the trial, and then ignored the judges who advised him to hire another. He seemed adrift but also supremely confident.

America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse. Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system.

On a cold, sunny New Year’s Eve in 2014, I am sitting at the edge of my king-size bed at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, munching through a stack of Wagyu beef slices and demolishing a bottle of pinot noir while watching a woman play a man playing a bearded woman on Russian state television. Standing on a stage lit by gleaming chandeliers before an audience of Russia’s elite celebrities, the parodist Elena Vorobei...

How did a homeless kid from Boston transform himself into a major overlord in Chinatown's criminal underworld?

From imitation Gauguins to a piece of the true cross, how two small-town crooks fooled art collectors around the world and built an epic empire of fakes.