Two years after the Tesla CEO crowdsourced the idea for the Hyperloop, his dream of a ‘fifth mode’ of transportation is quickly and quietly becoming a reality, but what’s his endgame? By Alexander Chee.

“I wasn’t a hunter-fisherman. And it was not a good idea, and then it went terribly wrong.” By Holly Anderson.

David Milch, the storied mind also behind 'Deadwood,' changed television. Now, according to a lawsuit, the racetrack regular has lost his homes, owes the IRS $17 million and is on a $40-a-week allowance. Still, his supporters stay close: "He's brilliant.” This story first appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

James McGibney had been mulling over the idea of a database of infidelity for some time before he got round to launching it -- with a characteristic eye for promotion -- on Valentine's Day 2011. He had been considering such a website since serving in the Marine Corps: a friend had returned from a posting in Japan to discover that, not only had his partner been cheating on him, but there was another compelling detail -- she was pregnant with somebody else's child.

In little more than eight years, Adele has come from nowhere to establish herself as one of the world's biggest entertainment brands, right up there with Grand Theft Auto, Star Wars, FIFA 2016, and Call of Duty. The proof was in the prizes on Wednesday night, when she walked away with a record-equalling four Brit Awards. Her success is a remarkable achievement - all the more impressive given that she is operating in a market that has roughly halved in size over the past decade.

Ugandan schoolboy Tumusiime Henry was 15 when he was accused of murder the first time. While he waited almost two years for the trial to begin he was accused of a second murder. But then he met an American lawyer who slowly realised it was up to him to come to the rescue of an innocent teenager. Henry was at school when the men came for him. They were not wearing uniforms, so he did not realise at first that it was the police...

We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones. It’s never a happy moment when you’re shopping for a tombstone. When death comes, it’s the loss that transcends everything else and most tombstones are purchased in a fog of grief. Death is a threshold for the relatives and friends who live on as well, changing lives in both intense and subtle ways. It’s the most dramatic and yet the most mundane event of a life, something we all do, no exceptions, no passes.

Han Tak Lee, 81, spends much of his time alone in a small room in Queens. It is a ground-floor studio apartment with a kitchenette and a bathroom, right beside train tracks used by the Long Island Rail Road. Commuter trains roar by every so often, though the double-glazing of his windows reduces the noise to a gentle whoosh. His cramped living situation invites a comparison to the way he spent most of the past quarter-century.

In Chatuchak, Bangkok’s largest outdoor market, smells compete. A bleachy chemical tang replaces a foul suggestion of powdered prawn. This is where you’ll find luxury of spurious origin—Mulberry bags, Lacoste polos, and Tom Ford perfume. There are also pets (lordly tortoises and exhausted rats) and snacks (garlicky sour sausage and thick guava juice). And there are chickens, which, I guess, straddle the pet-snack conceptual divide.

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves. Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely...

Meet the people who play games that resemble their 9-to-5s. Dave Werdan always wanted to be a truck driver. On Middle America road trips with his family, Werdan as a child would gaze out the window and watch the trucks go by, giddily imagining himself driving one. “It was just the adventure behind it,” he said. “You go everywhere!” A dozen years later, behind the wheel of his 2010 Peterbilt 579, the life of a trucker isn’t so glamorous.

Stephen Sluyter was lounging on his leather couch, taking bong hits and watching the Cartoon Network, when his phone rang. "Bro, you hungry?" his best friend and roommate Max Bocanegra asked on the other end of the line. "I got some beans for you. I need you to get them right now." Sluyter was a 28-year-old graduate student at Texas A&M – Corpus Christi, and founder of its Kappa Sigma fraternity chapter, famous for the slip-and-slide parties and oil-wrestling events...

Jacqueline Fox worked in restaurant kitchens and school cafeterias, cleaned people’s houses, watched their kids, raised a son, and took in two foster children. She was careful about her appearance and liked to tend the garden in front of her home in Birmingham, Alabama. She had been treated for high blood pressure, arthritis, and diabetes, but, at 59, she was feeling pretty good. In the spring of 2013, her poodle, Dexter...

In 2007, after his freshman year at the University of Texas San Antonio, James Moore dropped out. His mother, recently divorced, lived on a single income; even after selling her house, she couldn’t afford tuition. Forced to drop out and already facing formidable student debt, Moore didn’t give up on his education. “I made it a goal of mine,” he says, “to do whatever I could to get back into a situation where I could attend school.”

For Catholic priests, love plays a major professional role. They talk endlessly about the love of God, love for God, God's love of man, love of neighbor, even love of self, albeit this last one at times disparagingly. The one that lights them up the most, however, is their love of the priesthood, something every priest I know feels deeply. But the actual mechanics of love between two humans — the many powerful and often conflicted feeling that arise — create problems...

On a crisp Saturday in November 2014, a black Mercedes SUV pulled onto the tarmac of an Austrian specialty aviation company 30 miles south of Vienna. Employees of the firm, Airborne Technologies, which specialized in designing and equipping small aircraft with wireless surveillance platforms, had been ordered to work that weekend because one of the company’s investors was scheduled to inspect their latest project.

Chino hits the ground. He was led to the edge of the wall by two polleros. The smugglers helped him jump. But they wouldn’t be joining him on the other side. “You have a phone?” the polleros had asked when they picked him up earlier that day. “Yes, I have a phone,” he told them. “Look, this is really easy,” one of them explained. “You have to jump and run. You are going to see some houses at the end, you have to run toward the houses.”

The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians...

Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities. He recently read “The Maze Runner,” a sci-fi thriller in which teenagers live inside a booby-­trapped labyrinth, and was inspired to concoct his own version — something he then would challenge his friends to navigate.

Decades into the war on drugs, the world doesn't have much to show for it. The US is now in the middle of an opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic that has killed tens of thousands each year, despite tough-on-crime policies enforced under the drug war. Mexico has suffered from tens of thousands of deaths annually as the black market for drugs finances drug cartels that are so powerful they can wage war against governments and conquer cities.