Appalled by migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Chris Catrambone bought a boat and launched his own rescue mission. But as he discovered, there are pitfalls to going it alone.

I felt unmoored and directionless after my high school job at Babbage’s dissolved at the end of 1997. I’d met my wonderful wife there—we’d go on to get married in 2003—but Babbage’s had been the only job I’d known. When the doors finally shut, I wasn’t sure what to do. I skipped the typical teenager process of wandering around the mall filling out dozens of applications for various stores—I’d gotten the job at Babbage’s merely by asking for it.

You don't see an All Star Comics #3 every day. Published in 1940, it’s a milestone in what’s known as the Golden Age of comic books: the debut of the first bonafide superhero team, the Justice Society of America. There’s hardly a plot, only a meeting of some of DC’s biggest stars — Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman — taking turns sharing tales as if they were telling ghost stories at a campfire.

The line for lawyers and family members to get into Lefortovo prison starts to form around five in the morning. The building, on a quiet street just east of Moscow’s Third Ring Road, now officially belongs to the Ministry of Justice, but it’s still informally known as the prison of the F.S.B., a successor agency to the K.G.B. Early on June 16, 2014, one of the prisoners awaiting visitors was Boris Kolesnikov, a general who had been the deputy head of the...

Bich Ha and Huei Hann Pan were classic examples of the Canadian immigrant success story. Hann was raised and educated in Vietnam and moved to Canada as a political refugee in 1979. Bich (pronounced “Bick”) came separately, also a refugee. They married in Toronto and lived in Scarborough. They had two kids, Jennifer, in 1986, and Felix, three years later, and found jobs at the Aurora-based auto parts manufacturer Magna International...

A game I sometimes like to play with people is called Guess What Beyoncé Is Doing Right Now. I am reasonably certain I invented this game, which is actually two games. The first game is to guess what American celebrity Beyoncé (net worth ~$450 million) is doing at any given moment. The second game is to estimate the likelihood that your guess is correct.

On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working. They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards.

“It’s irrational, this isn’t his fault, but I can see him (if he doesn’t die soon) at 30 or 35, telling people about his ‘best friend Paul’ and about how he tried to save you but couldn’t, and I can hear him tell it with earnestness and persuasion and even see the girl who will be with him, rub his back, and cry one single tear and think to herself, ‘What an amazing man to have come through all this.’ And Ryan—yes, by then, he’ll use his real name—will never mention his...” By Barry Friedman.

I wish to emphasise before I begin that robots taking jobs is not the problem, the issue is the current government policies that are not ready to handle this disruption. I am not against automation, far from it, I want as much automation as possible but it would be naive to not consider any potential side effects with the way policies currently are and how slow government and culture can change regarding attitudes towards the most vulnerable in our society. The way the unemployed are treated...

Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I send out once or twice a week. This is my annual attempt to bring some of those stories to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article that was published last calendar year and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement.

A family epic spanning the GRACIE JIU-JITSU dynasty’s generations of combat and betrayal, from the Amazon to Hollywood to the UFC.

A few years ago, the writer Joy Williams’s favorite church needed to dispose of a few extra pews after a renovation. Williams attends the church only in April and October, when her frequent cross-country drives take her to Laramie, Wyo., but she wanted a pew anyway. She borrowed a trailer, got a friend to help her load the pew and drove a thousand miles, pulling it behind her enormous Bronco, her two German shepherds...

When Ken Dornstein learned that Pan Am Flight 103 had exploded, he did not realize that his older brother, David, was on the plane. It was December 22, 1988, and Ken, a sophomore at Brown University, was at home, in Philadelphia, on winter break. Over breakfast, he read about the disaster in the Inquirer: all two hundred and fifty-nine passengers were killed, along with eleven residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, where flaming...

The not-so-young parents sat in the office of their socio-genetic consultant, an occupation that emerged in the late 2030s, with at least one practitioner in every affluent fertility clinic. They faced what had become a fairly typical choice: Twelve viable embryos had been created in their latest round of in vitro fertilization. Anxiously, they pored over the scores for the various traits they had received from the clinic.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and clothing store, lives in a trailer park in downtown Las Vegas. The Airstream Park, as it's called, occupies about half a city block, surrounded by a tall fence crowned with barbed wire and punctuated with palm trees. When I arrived in April, Adirondack chairs, picnic tables, and a colorful assortment of portable seating encircled a pair of fire pits.

Her name was Segen. In the early hours of the morning of June 28, 2014, she had boarded a boat in Libya with her youngest daughter, Abigail. Segen was 24, slender; Abi was not quite two years old, a frizz of hair and pudgy baby cheeks. They weren’t alone on the boat: All in, there were at least 243 people on board, crammed together, human cargo.

Mark Bowden was watching a ballgame — the Phillies versus the Mets — on the night of May 1, 2011, when the network cut away to President Obama in the East Room of the White House. “Tonight,” the president said, ‘‘I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder...

On January 27, 2013, 21-year-old Elisa Lam stepped off a train from San Diego in downtown Los Angeles, gathered her belongings, and walked to a hostel on Main Street. It was, like most every mid-winter day in LA, sunny and in the mid-60s, the kind of weather that makes people never want to leave. Under such conditions — when a warm, low-angle winter sun softens the entire landscape — it’s possible to not fully absorb the reality that this 54-block section of LA...

The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone. Neighbors crowd into a circle around her, here on this hill of rubbish next to their settlement, Warakum. They watch as the men blindfold her before tying her arms, legs and stomach to a log. They watch as wood is stacked and gasoline poured. They watch as their witch is pushed facedown onto the pyre. Camera phones are held up and aimed. The match is struck and thrown.

Diana Kim has spent the past 12 years photographing people living on the streets of Hawaii. But her project to humanise homelessness suddenly became very personal when her own father ended up living rough. Kim, a law student, explains how, in an effort to save him, she turned her camera on him. My father introduced me to photography. He was a landscape photographer and I remember my early years sitting...