On a grey January morning at 9.15, residents of the Oaks shelter for the homeless started lining up, coffee mugs in hand, at a yellow linoleum counter. At half past the hour, the pour began. The Oaks’ residents are hard-core alcoholics. They line up to get what most people would consider the very last thing they need: an hourly mug of alcohol.

Hacker Maksym Popov gave himself up to the FBI and joined its fight against Eastern European cybercrime. Trouble is, he never really gave up his black hat. One Thursday in January 2001, Maksym Igor Popov, a 20-year-old Ukrainian man, walked nervously through the doors of the United States embassy in London. While Popov could have been mistaken for an exchange student applying for a visa, in truth he was a hacker, part of an Eastern European...

It was a late summer morning when Robert “Fat Daddy” Taylor woke up, smoked two blunts, and decided to turn himself in. He’d been on the run for four days, and it seemed that everywhere he went in and around the 7 Mile neighborhood on the east side of Detroit, there were photos of him in stores, and people quick to call the police, to claim the $1,000 reward for finding him. “The streets talk,” Taylor told me recently. “Everybody was telling me, ‘Yo, Fats, man, those boys trying to get you.’ I couldn’t go nowhere. [The police] was everywhere.”

A medical marijuana and criminal defense lawyer from Southern California has made himself into the country’s leading defender of hackers. Can he save his clients from the worst law in technology — and themselves? The law offices of Jay Leiderman occupy the third floor of a beige building in an unlovely office park across a busy road from a strip mall that features a martial arts studio, a discount tool mart, and a vape shop called “Vapes!” Here in Ventura, California — known variously as “Ventucky,” “Bakersfield by the sea,” and, per one Urban Dictionary entry, “the armpit between Santa Barbara and Malibu” — the locals tend to...

One clear day last spring, Katharine Hayhoe walked into the limestone chambers of the Austin City Council to brief the members during a special meeting on how prepared the city was to deal with disasters and extreme weather. A respected atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, the 43-year-old had been invited to discuss climate change, and she breezed through her PowerPoint slides, delivering stark news in an upbeat manner: unless carbon emissions were swiftly curbed..

They are all white, all middle-aged, and all men. A few live openly lavish lifestyles, but the majority fly under the radar. Rarely is there news about them in the mainstream media or even the trade press. Their obscurity would seem unremarkable if we were talking about the biggest manufacturers of auto accessories or heating systems. But these are America's top gunmakers—leaders of the nation's most controversial industry. They have kept their heads down and their fingerprints off regulations designed...

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure.

On July 8, 2009, the champagne finally flowed. After an intense two-year competition, a consortium led by a Spanish company in severe financial distress learned that its rock-bottom bid of $3.1 billion had won the worldwide competition to build a new set of locks for the historic Panama Canal. The unlikely victors toasted their win at La Vitrola, a sleek restaurant in an upscale neighborhood east of downtown Panama City. Within days, executives of the four-nation consortium, Grupo Unidos por el Canal, flew to Europe to begin planning the project.

This is the biggest investigation we’ve ever published. Five chapters! Chapter 1: "Inmates Run This Bitch". Have you ever had a riot?" I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). "The last riot we had was two years ago," he says over the phone. "Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans!" says a woman's voice, cutting in. "We got rid of them." "When can you start?" the man asks. I tell him I need to think it over.

After decades of tearing down the food establishment, America's culinary renegade Anthony Bourdain looks back on his own legacy. "Look, I talk about everything. My d*ck has been on TMZ, so what’s left?" The man says, “Can I take you up the back way?” We’re in the new Manhattan offices of Zero Point Zero, the film production company for Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. “Do you mind?”

Lawrence Beitler was sitting on the front porch of his home in Marion, Indiana, when someone asked him to tote his 8×10 view camera to the town square. It was past midnight on August 8, 1930, and Beitler, 44, was a professional photographer who mostly shot portraits of weddings, schoolchildren, and church groups. That night, he would be photographing a lynching. He “didn’t even want to do it,” according to a later interview with his daughter, “but taking pictures was his business.”

He worked for FEMA at ground zero, but then Kurt Sonnenfeld became a suspect in the mysterious and high-profile death of his wife. Now he's found a new life in South America and become a folk hero by telling an amazing story about the World Trade Center attacks. Did Sonnenfeld get away with murder, or is he just an innocent abroad? Evan Hughes tracked him down in Argentina and asked the big questions...

On July 4, the Freedom of Information Act turns 50, and yet our government is more secretive than ever. One Boston journalism startup is trying to change that—and their revolutionary approach to transparency is working, one public records request at a time. Massachusetts is the birthplace of the American Revolution. But lately, the “We the People” spirit has been conspicuously lacking when it comes to government transparency.

O.K., Peter Doig may have tried LSD a few times when he was growing up in Canada during the 1970s. But he still knows, he said, when a painting is or isn’t his. So when Mr. Doig, whose eerie, magical landscapes have made him one of the world’s most popular artists, was sent a photograph of a canvas he said he didn’t recognize, he disavowed it. “I said, ‘Nice painting,’” he recalled in an interview. “‘Not by me.’” The owner, however, disagreed and sued him, setting up one of the stranger art authentication cases in recent history.

Do you believe that positive thinking can help you achieve your goals? Many people today do. Pop psychology and the $12 billion self-help industry reinforce a widespread belief that positive thinking can improve our moods and lead to beneficial life changes. In her book The Secret Daily Teachings (2008), the self-help author Rhonda Byrne suggested that: ‘Whatever big thing you are asking for, consider having the celebration now as though you have received it.’

Before Nicolás (Shaco) Flores was killed, deep in the Peruvian rain forest, he had spent decades reaching out to the mysterious people called the Mashco Piro. Flores lived in the Madre de Dios region—a vast jungle surrounded by an even vaster wilderness, frequented mostly by illegal loggers, miners, narco-traffickers, and a few adventurers. For more than a hundred years, the Mashco had lived in almost complete isolation; there were rare sightings, but they were often indistinguishable from backwoods folklore.

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture.

Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market. Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.

It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker. For a certain kind of person, at any rate — ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was. Just over a decade old, Gawker still thought of itself as a pirate ship, but a very big pirate ship, ballasted by semi-respectable journalism, and much less prone to setting itself on fire than in its early days, when its writers had a tendency to make loud and famous enemies and when its staff was subjected to near-annual purges...

You could say the job of the sports fan is not only to cheer but to jeer. Take the Rio Olympics. American sprinter Justin Gatlin, who has been suspended in the past for doping, entered Olympic Stadium before his 100-meter race to resounding boos. Competitors are also a part of the ritual. After winning a gold medal, American swimmer Lilly King wagged her finger to mock her Russian competitor Yulia Efimova, who previously had been suspended for doping.