I was 6 years old when my two older sisters went to Palestine to "visit family." At least that's what my mom told me. I was born in Chicago, like my sisters, but our parents are Palestinian, born in Jerusalem. I was four-months-old when our father died — he worked at a gas station and was shot during a robbery. After that, the four of us moved into the basement apartment of my mom's mother's house, where my sisters and I shared a room.

On December 19, 2013, after a groundbreaking ACLU report that detailed the harsh realities for inmates sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent offenses, President Barack Obama granted clemency to eight federal inmates now known as “Obama’s Eight.” The group was the first wave of inmates to have their sentences commuted by Obama. Jason Hernandez was one of them. Hernandez was once a prominent crack dealer from McKinney. He started out on the street corners of East McKinney at the age of fifteen, learning from his brother J.J., whose escalating crack addiction would propel Hernandez deeper into the drug game.

Six months ago I made a pledge to jump out of the consumer rat race and embark on a no spend year, and I can honestly say the past 183 days have changed my life for the better. Deciding to stop spending money was a shock to the system but one that I, and my spendthrift ways, sorely needed. Other than bills and food, I’d decided to spend nothing for a year starting 27 November. The first month of the challenge was almost fun as I settled into a routine of preparing meals and calculating cycle routes. The ease of the first few weeks lulled me into a false sense of security, as the new year brought challenges.

The former 'Late Show' host tells Tom Brokaw: "I'm happy for the guys [late-night hosts] — men and women — there should be more women." David Letterman hosted a late-night talk show for 33 years, but now, he says, he isn't all that interested in what's going on right now in the late-night landscape. "I couldn't care less about late-night television," he says in an interview with Tom Brokaw for NBC News' On Assignment, a limited series from...

The mathematician Ken Ono believes that the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan—mathematical savant and two-time college dropout—holds valuable lessons for how we find and reward hidden genius.

To reach the Venus Project Research Center, a utopian compound created by a 100-year-old futurist, drive through vast stretches of fields, orchards, and dirt roads in south-central Florida. There's little cell phone service and no signs of other humans on the way to a white gate. A sandy path flanked by lush tropical trees leads to a cluster of white dome-like structures. Inside one sits Jacque Fresco, hunched on a couch within his own model of an ideal society.

Imagine if the former Mafia boss John Gotti, who went to prison for murder and cultivated the public’s fascination with his flamboyant New York lifestyle and menacing charm, had a YouTube channel. Imagine if he used that channel to become a video star by portraying himself as a penitent hit man and regaling viewers with tales of violence while seeking forgiveness for homicides past. For Colombians, the real-life equivalent of such an unlikely YouTube sensation can be found in John Jairo Velásquez.

Edward Snowden lay on his back in the rear of a Ford Escape, hidden from view and momentarily unconscious, as I drove him to the Whitney museum one recent morning to meet some friends from the art world. Along West Street, clotted with traffic near the memorial pools of the World Trade Center, a computerized voice from my iPhone issued directions via the GPS satellites above. Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, was sitting shotgun, chattily recapping his client’s recent activities.

Lond-based photographer Brock Elbank is on a journey to photograph 150 freckled people for his next exhibition in 2017. He wants to celebrate beauty and, since mid-2015, he has succeeded with 90 striking portraits. If you want to be featured, you can still contact him!

It happened two summers ago, as Joe Robinson was marking down the prices on the pots he was selling at a fine arts festival in Oregon. “I pick pots up by the rim, flip them upside down, see if the price looks right, maybe cross it out, put something else,” Robinson told The Washington Post on Friday. Regular, everyday stuff, you know? On that day in 2014, though, he picked up a pot that had an imprint of a fern on it. He flipped it over. And as he did, out dropped a $100 bill, upon which a name was written: “Benny.”

Daniel Kuettel has vivid memories of the day in 2012 when he renounced his United States citizenship. A heavy fog hung around the US Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, where he would raise his right hand and swear, "I hereby absolutely and entirely renounce my United States nationality." Right before he entered the embassy, though, Kuettel witnessed a serious car accident right in front of him, which seemed almost like an omen. "It was really weird, just a really strange day," said Kuettel, 43. "I was sad, happy, scared, relieved, worried, excited, angry, delighted..."

For 53 years, Justo Gallego has been building a cathedral by hand on the outskirts of Madrid almost entirely by himself. Gallego has no formal architecture or construction training, but that hasn't stopped him from toiling on this herculean task. At 90 years old, Gallego knows that he will not be able to finish the project in his lifetime. But he keeps at it anyway, day after day, driven by his faith.

Actor Michael Caine, 83, has officially changed his name. To "Michael Caine." Until now, his legal name was "Maurice Micklewhite." "I changed my name when all the stuff started with ISIS," the artist formerly known as Micklewhite told The Sun. "An airport security guard would say 'Hi Michael Caine,' and suddenly I'd give him a passport with a different name on it. I could stand there for an hour. So I changed my name."

Michael Jordan, widely considered the greatest basketball player in NBA history and the lone African-American majority owner of a franchise, has decided to speak out on the country’s growing racial and social unrest. “As a proud American, a father who lost his own dad in a senseless act of violence, and a black man, I have been deeply troubled by the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement and angered by the cowardly and hateful targeting and killing of police officers...

Danny Lyon has spent much of his career taking intimate photographs of marginal, working-class, and outlaw communities. By Max Nelson.

Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health. He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10. But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels. The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service...

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.

You're desperate to be a success, aren't you? What else is there in life? If you can't waft into a fancy restaurant and turn heads with your sense of net worth, who are you? How do you get there, though? Malcolm Gladwell would have you believe that you must spend 10,000 hours working at something before you can be truly world class. Though some think this might be truly nonsense. We now have a new definition from Marissa Mayer.

Alex Honnold has his own verb. “To honnold”—usually written as “honnolding”—is to stand in some high, precarious place with your back to the wall, looking straight into the abyss. To face fear, literally. The verb was inspired by photographs of Honnold in precisely that position on Thank God Ledge, located 1,800 feet off the deck in Yosemite National Park. Honnold side-shuffled across this narrow sill of stone, heels to the wall, toes touching the void, when, in 2008, he became the first rock climber ever to scale the sheer granite face of Half Dome alone and without a rope.

On a sleek white coffee table in Apple CEO Tim Cook’s fourth-floor office in late July, beneath framed posters of Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson, a rose gold iPhone 6s sits in its original box. Earlier that morning, Cook had stood in front of employees at Apple headquarters and held up the phone, which a staffer had hand-delivered from a store in Beijing to commemorate a notable occasion: Apple had sold its billionth iPhone. That celebratory milestone — Cook laughs when asked by a reporter if he’ll stop counting...