“Michael May had everything. Happy marriage, great family, successful business. He was even a world-class athlete. What kind of a man would upset such a PERFECT LIFE by doing something as crazy as trying to get his sight back?” | read now

“Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn't do) was entirely up to him.” | read now

“In the fall of 2004, a Brinks truck loaded with cash was rumbling down highway 416 south of Ottawa, picking up bank deposits from stores and restaurants along the way, when the driver noticed something troubling in his rearview mirror. It was a grey Hyundai.” | read now

“A mother describes the surprising effect that the pharmaceutical sleeping drug Ambien has had on her brain-damaged son.” | read now

“Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.” | read now

“A man out of work finds community at Occupy Wall Street.” | read now

“It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six.” | read now

“When Colin Hughes was about eleven years old his parents brought home a rather strange toy. It wasn't colorful or cartoonish; it didn't seem to have any lasers or wheels or flashing lights; the box it came in was decorated, not with the bust of a supervillain or gleaming protagonist, but bulleted text and a picture of a QWERTY keyboard. It called itself the "ORIC-1 Micro Computer." The package included two cassette tapes, a few cords and a 130-page programming manual.” | read now

“As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be.” | read now

“The 1971 article about phone hacking that inspired Steve Jobs.” | read now

“Steven Paul Jobs, 56, died Wednesday at his home with his family. The co-founder and, until last August, CEO of Apple Inc was the most celebrated person in technology and business on the planet. No one will take issue with the official Apple statement that “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.” ” | read now

“Before they built an international underworld empire — before they weaseled their way onto millions of computers, before their online enterprise was bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, before they were fugitives wanted by Interpol — Sam Jain, now 41, and Daniel Sundin, 33, were just a couple of garden-variety Internet hustlers.” | read now

“Is there any hope for the hung over?” | read now

“How a high school jock from Texas rose to the top of one of Mexico's most powerful and ruthless cartels” | read now

“From chemical poisons to deadly mushrooms, Deborah Blum explains that food is still the most dangerous thing we can eat. ” | read now

“Decoding the chaos of Lagos.” | read now

“The lush peaks of Iraqi Kurdistan are irresistible to a certain breed of bold backpacker: They're exotic, beautiful, and way off the beaten track. But when three young Americans were arrested by Iranian border guards last July after straying too far down a waterfall trail, the costs of adventure travel got a lot higher. As the hikers languished in their cells, we sent JOSHUA HAMMER to find out how they got into this mess-and what it would take to get them out.” | read now

“The company's goal is to get consumers to embrace bugs as an eco-friendly alternative to conventional meat. With worldwide demand for meat expected to nearly double by 2050, farm-raised crickets, locusts, and mealworms could provide comparable nutrition while using fewer natural resources than poultry or livestock. Crickets, for example, convert feed to body mass about twice as efficiently as pigs and five times as efficiently as cattle. Insects require less land and water-and measured per kilogram of edible mass, mealworms generate 10 to 100 times less greenhouse gas than pigs. ” | read now

“When the ocean liner Andrea Doria sank south of Cape Cod, she took fifty-one with her. Since then she's taken twelve more, five in the last two summers alone. On this very day, a man is strapping on two hundred pounds of scuba gear to make the descent, to bring back a little souvenir from the boat's gift shop, to possibly never return.” | read now

“The skyrocketing market value of yarchagumba, a rare fungus prized as an aphrodisiac, has led to turf wars-and possibly murder.” | read now

“What happened that night in Abbottabad.” | read now

“Rodolfo Rodriguez Cabrera didn't set out to mastermind a global counterfeiting ring. All he wanted was to earn a decent living doing what he loves most: tinkering with electronics. That's why he started his own slot-machine repair company in Riga, Latvia. Just to make a little cash while playing with circuit boards.” | read now

“WHAT'S WRONG? I asked John Ruskey. He slowly closed his cell phone. Glancing toward photographer Chris LaMarca to see if he was in earshot, he gazed at the churning Mississippi. It was our second day canoeing the Great Flood of 2011, and the river was hurling us southward at a rate of almost 100 miles a day. My wife, John finally answered, shaking his head. Somebody told her there's a shoot-to-kill order for anyone on the water. This was bad news.” | read now

“The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game's environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor - and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer's mind, his game would share many qualities with religion - a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.” | read now

“In Rio, where the next Summer Olympics and World Cup will be held, nearby neighborhoods have become war zones.” | read now

“The true story of bullets, bombs and a Marine platoon at war in Iraq” | read now

“They did it for the simplest of reasons: adventure. Three friends, on a drunken dare, set out in a dinghy for a nearby island. But when the gas ran out and they drifted into barren waters, their biggest threat wasn't the water or the ocean - it was each other” | read now

“Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.” | read now

“Jamaica's dancehall music is being blamed for the country's violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don't see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation.” | read now

“The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?” | read now

“One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn't stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.” | read now