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Cyrus Field and the epic struggle to lay the first transatlantic cable.

Illegal coal mines near Beijing used to provide the perfect cover for murder-extortion plots, before the truth came to light.

The faculty of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, has selected “The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States.” We began with a list of eighty nominees. Our purpose was to call attention to and honor work of exceptional importance and quality - journalism that brilliantly met the challenges of this difficult decade.

The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Arranged in chronological order.

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

You think it’d be impossible to share your house with your wife, your daughter, and fifty million or so Argentine ants. And you would be correct.

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.

What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

From US military computers to a cafe in Brussels, how thousands of classified papers found their way to online activists.

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

A visit to the glamorous divorce ranches of the Mad Men era.

John Peterson has kept the Hollywood emblems gleaming for 14 years. With 2,412 stars, that’s 110 a day and a full-time job.

Ron Fanelli was a poker player: loud, brash, rightwing, ex-US navy. Victoria Coren liked him. Then last week she learned that he had confessed to killing bar girl Wanphen Pienjai in Thailand and chopping up her body.

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

Stop looking to the World Cup for history lessons. It’s just a game and, frankly, that’s good enough.

Criminal profiling made easy.

Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

“I may be a thief and a liar,” he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. “But I am going to tell you a true story.”

As it wins the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, revisit the true story behind one soldier’s last trip home

The effeminate sheep and other problems with Darwinian sexual selection.