Chiloé Island, in the Los Lagos region of southern Chile, is home to a fiercely independent seafaring people who have thrived culturally in defiance of the Chilean government. The islanders have developed a distinctive mythology made up of powerful shamans who wear waistcoats made from the flesh of dead virgins, hidden caves that are inhabited by deformed, goat-like mutes and even a phosphorescent ghost-ship that many islanders still believe haunts their coast and harvests...

When Hugo Lucitante was a boy, his tribe sent him away to learn about the outside world so that, one day, he might return and save their village. Can he live up to their hopes?

No American ATM has ever been robbed with explosive gas. The same was true in Britain — until 2013. Now there have been more than 90. Inside the birth of a bomb spree. Along the western coast of England, under a half-moon hidden by clouds, a dark Audi sports car with fabricated plates followed an empty road toward a Barclays bank. Inside were five men, dressed all in black, and their gear: crowbars, power tools, coils of flexible...

For most teenagers, getting out of bed in the morning is a drag. But when Lloyd Johnson was 13 years old, he suddenly found waking up not just irritating, but agonizing and confusing. Sometimes he would open his eyes and already be in the car on the way to school — with no memory of showering or getting dressed. Other days, his family would drag him outside and pour water over his head to stir him, but still he’d remain asleep. His toughest mornings began when he woke up in an empty house...

In December, Jeb Bush posted an update on his Facebook page which began by reporting that, over Thanksgiving, he and his family had “shared good food and watched a whole lot of football.” He added, “We also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.”

Marcus Wanner needed a little adventure in his life. A skinny 15-year-old brainiac with wire-frame glasses and wavy brown hair, he was the eldest of five, home-schooled by their mother, a devout Catholic, near Roanoke, Virginia. Shuttling Marcus between home, church and the Boy Scouts seemed like the best way to keep him away from trouble (and girls). "I missed out on a lot," he recalls with a sigh. "I didn't get out much."

"When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her." The first and only time I had sex it did not go well. I was twenty-two, a late bloomer by most of popular culture’s standards, and for the year my boyfriend and I had been dating, we’d skirted around the issue. He’d repeated that he was willing to wait, however long it might take me to be ready, and I’d chafed at his understanding...

Lord Timothy Dexter was many things. He was a famed 18th century entrepreneur -- one who made a series of apparently harebrained transactions, and somehow emerged handsomely rewarded each time. He was a poor, uneducated leather craftsman who, by fortuitously (and stupidly) speculating on the Continental dollar, became one of the richest men in Boston, and who then unsuccessfully lobbied for entry into elite social circles for decades.

A new book from David Foster Wallace, six years after his death, revives the debate about his greatness...and why so many otherwise smart readers can’t see it.

Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain’s Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade’s worth of research into the ways children play. The group, which is called the Future Lab, is the Danish toy giant’s secretive and highly ambitious R&D team, charged with inventing entirely new, technologically enhanced "play experiences" for kids all over the world.

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Colonel Jose Espejo was a man with a problem. As the Colombian army’s communications expert watched the grainy video again, he saw kidnapped soldiers chained up inside barbed-wire pens in a hostage camp deep in the jungle, guarded by armed FARC guerillas. Some had been hostages for more than 10 years, and many suffered from a grim, flesh-eating disease caused by insect bites. It was 2010, and the straight-talking Espejo was close to retirement after 22 years of military service.

It has been a year since the guards at a prison camp just below the Arctic Circle told Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon and once the richest man in Russia, to pack his things. They put him on a plane to St. Petersburg; there they handed him a parka and a passport and put him on a flight to Berlin. Since that day of release and exile, Khodorkovsky has been living outside Zurich and travelling to capitals throughout the West, making speeches...

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the world leader in space exploration. JPL scientists have put robots on Mars, sent probes into interstellar space, and collected dust from the tails of comets. But what if the real purpose behind its mission was something darker? What if the lab was less interested in exploring outer space than the depths of the void? What if its researchers huddled around their computer screens in search of paranormal entities or dark gods crawling clear of the event...

Tex G. Hall, the three-term tribal chairman on this remote, once impoverished reservation, was the very picture of confidence as he strode to the lectern at his third Annual Bakken Oil and Gas Expo and gazed out over a stuffed, backlit mountain lion. Tall and imposing beneath his black cowboy hat, he faced an audience of political and industry leaders lured from far and wide to the “Texpo,” as some here called it. It was late April at the 4 Bears Casino...

By the first days of October, the outdoor basketball court at the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, had become an open-air waiting room of despair. Pain emanated like heat. Under the court’s high, corrugated tin roof, the families of 43 missing students gathered to face the hours between search expeditions, protests, and meetings with government officials, human-rights workers, and forensic anthropologists. Assembled in clumps at the court’s edges...

With roughly 100,000 large merchant ships in the water at any time, scores sink, burn, break apart, run aground, or explode each year—often with toxic consequences. It is Captain Nick Sloane's job to board troubled vessels and salvage what he can. Against heavy odds, he recently refloated the doomed cruise ship Costa Concordia. William Langewiesche explains why Sloane may be the most valuable man on the seas

Where is Santa Iris Guzman? The question had taken on almost folklore status in Mellisa Sanchez’s family. Like a precious heirloom, it was passed down through four generations, ever since a summer day in 1949, when the little girl with the big brown eyes and soft curls disappeared in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.

Jeffrey Meldrum is a respected anthropologist risking his reputation to prove Sasquatch is real; Rick Dyer is a self-described “entertainer” unapologetically capitalizing off it. Their rivalry represents two sides of the fractious but booming subculture.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a group of squatters from East and West set out to build their own unified Germany. And, despite endless parties, questionable hygiene, and neo-Nazi turf wars, they pulled it off.