In remote villages in Italy all the way to the cold mountains in the Middle East the mourners dress the color of death and chase the casket. The women reach their hands to the very limit of their bones and cry a burst of thorns. As if they want the heavens to hear their grief. I wonder if anyone is listening. And does it matter?

Internet fame comes on like an earthquake, with little warning. In a matter of hours, a video can go viral and be viewed 50 million times. Then it (usually) recedes into a very long, thin afterlife. Here, nine YouTube sensations whose lives were upended briefly in the past decade (plus one from the prehistoric web era, before YouTube made its debut in 2005) speak about this odd, relatively new kind of fame. Most embraced the experience, seeing where it would take them.

Eric Hites hit rock bottom earlier this year. At age 40, after having worked as a D.J., roadie, telemarketer, pizza delivery man and bartender, he found himself unemployed, and collection agencies were on his tail. His wife, who had left him in July 2014, was living with another man. His weight reached 567 pounds. He told himself he had a choice: Rot away in Danville, Ind., where he had been living with his parents, or do something drastic to save his life and marriage.

“He’s only 17, how can he be dead?” For once, Big Gay Mick wasn’t saying much. “I don’t know. We just seen his stepdad getting out of a taxi at the top of the street and he told us.” There was no getting any other details out of him; he was in shock. Big Gay Mick was not normally lost for words. Stick-thin, with a baseball cap permanently pulled down over his eyes and a gold chain around his neck, you might have mistaken him for one of the neighbourhood...

The fulfilling life of Donald Grey Triplett offers an important lesson for today. Donald Grey Triplett was the first person to be diagnosed with autism. The fulfilling life he has led offers an important lesson for today, John Donvan and Caren Zucker write. After Rain Man, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the next great autism portrayal the stage or screen might want to consider taking on is the life of one Donald Grey Triplett...

Bowie managed to resist the cult of youth that later trapped Mick Jagger and others of their generation. Is there a readier figure of fun in our culture than the aging rock star? The SoulCycle instructor and the urban farmer are more au courant targets. But not so long ago, during the Clinton presidency, before the jokes simply ran out, there was no better butt than the Rolling Stones embarking on yet another reunion tour.

Hosni Kaliya pulls a cigarette out of his pack with his mouth. When he poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire, most of his right hand was consumed by the flames and all that remains is a stump without fingers. He still has four fingers on his left hand, but they jut out like claws, burned, stiff and contorted. His fingernails are curled. He wears black wool gloves with the fingertips cut off, so that they won't dangle emptily. A knit cap protects Kaliya's head...

For six weeks last October and November, just before Myanmar held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones. A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact. A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is...

Bobby Ray Simmons Jr, better known as BoB, American rapper and music producer, believes that the Earth is flat, according to recent tweets from his account. The rapper – who has released hits Nothin’ on You, Airplanes and Magic – posted dozens of tweets, presenting a variety of arguments as to why modern science is wrong. “A lot of people are turned off by the phrase ‘flat earth’ ... but there’s no way u can see all the evidence and not know... grow up,” he tweeted.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution sheds light on the Black Panther Party — and all its reviled, adored, misunderstood, and mythologized history.

A visual diary of four decades' worth of neighbors, constituents and sparring partners—and what they really thought of Bernie Sanders. By Elijah Solomon Hurwitz. (Feb. 4)

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.

When late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died at a Texas ranch two weeks ago, he was without the customary security detail the U.S. Marshals typically provide for such elites. Why, you ask? Because he was hunkered down with a highly secretive and enigmatic fraternity full of crazy expensive guns, ceremonial daggers, and powerful people. Wednesday night, the Washington Post broke the news that Scalia was joined at the ranch by members...

Debi Thomas, the best African American figure skater in the history of the sport, couldn’t find her figure skates. She looked around the darkened trailer, perched along a river in a town so broke even the bars have closed, and sighed. The mobile home where she lives with her fiance and his two young boys was cluttered with dishes, stacks of documents, a Christmas tree still standing weeks past the holiday.

There's the Hollywood version of Facebook's founding, and then the real version. In the Hollywood-stylized version, a Harvard student needed a tool to date girls. The real version couldn't be further from the truth, Mark Zuckerberg told Mathias Döpfner in an interview with "Die Welt am Sonntag." At the time, he already had a girlfriend — Priscilla Chan, now his wife — and he was obsessed with the internet.

Sometimes, Lee Young Guk was mere feet away from Kim Jong Il. From the late 1970s till the late 1980s, Lee was a bodyguard for the then-future leader of North Korea and spent a decade in close proximity to the country's most powerful people. Today, Lee lives in the South Korean capital, Seoul, and travels the world to tell his story. On Tuesday, he was in Geneva at the Human Rights Summit. The 54-year-old has a clear mission...

Dear Strangers, I remember you. Ten months ago, when my cellphone rang with news of my father’s suicide, you were walking into Whole Foods prepared to do your grocery shopping, just as I had been only minutes before you. But I had already abandoned my cart full of groceries and I stood in the entryway of the store. My brother was on the other end of the line. He was telling me my father was dead, that he had taken his...

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.

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.

Former adult film star Bree Olson has a message for young girls: Don't get into porn. Olson was one of Charlie Sheen's live-in "goddesses" who shared his home with other women during his 2011 meltdown. Olson estimates she was making $30,000 to $60,000 a month in the adult film industry before she gave up her career and parted ways with Sheen. Since then, she's been trying to transition into mainstream life, but it hasn't been easy. Olson shared her struggles...