Magazine Feature Story

We met at 18. We wed at 24. At 27, I checked my wife into a psych ward—for the first time. How mental illness re-shapes a marriage.

A decade ago, people started panicking about the collapse of the honeybee population and the crash of our food supply. But today there are more honeybees than there were then. We have engineered our way to a frenzied and precarious new normal.

Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California's streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world?

More Americans are working late-night and early-morning hours. Who's looking after their kids?

The belief that hidden memories can be "recovered" in therapy should have been exorcised years ago, when a rash of false memories dominated the airwaves, tore families apart, and put people on the stand for crimes they didn't commit. But the mental health establishment does not always learn from its mistakes—and families are still paying the price.

The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise. A leading researcher on the psychology of human wrongness sets us straight.

The ability to delay gratification has been held up as the one character trait to rule them all—the key to academic success, financial security, and social well-being. But willpower isn't the answer. The new, emotional science of self-regulation.

For millions of Christians, biblical counselors have replaced psychologists. Some think it's time to reverse course.

Surgery is a fundamentally messy and stressful activity. When being a few millimeters off target can be life-changing, a surgeon needs to possess fierce concentration, unrelenting perfectionism, and, above all, staunch self-assurance.

Tracking the organ trade, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes visited African and South American dialysis units, organ banks, police morgues, and hospitals. She interviewed surgeons, patient's rights activists, pathologists, nephrologists, and nurses. So why aren't more people listening to her?

One in 10 American adults struggles with depression, and women are twice as susceptible as men. Is facial paralysis the answer?

Most scientists oppose Russ George's efforts to fix the world's climate. But who's going to do something about it?

An intellectual crisis in the age of TED talks and Freakonomics.

How the cult of self-optimization was born on the factory floor—with a manager's stopwatch in hand.

From 1960s Korea, through Brazil, to today's Los Angeles: Inside the world that brought you Forever 21—and those skinny jeans in your closet.

How to be an old-fashioned explorer—intrepid, obsessive, khaki-clad—without conquering anything. The secret life of Keith Muscutt.

Is culture just a side effect of the struggle to avoid disease?

After the last presidential election, wide-eyed pundits hailed a brave new era of political campaigning, crediting Obama's victory to his team's wizardry with data. The hype was premature. Here's what the story of 2012 really means for the future of politics.

How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? Ask a trivial question, get a profound, heartbreaking answer.

"Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day." That's what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women's careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.

Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.

As CEO of Intrade, John Delaney harnessed the wisdom of the crowds, with often freakishly prescient results. Technocratic dreamers were ecstatic about the company's ability to predict the future, and maybe even reshape society. Today Delaney's company has collapsed and his body is entombed atop Mount Everest. A tale of bravado, bluster, and efficient markets.

Meet Dave Ramsey, the most important personal finance guru in America. Millions of people follow his biblically inspired advice. It goes like this: 1. Purge yourself of debt; 2. Live on cash; 3. Pretend economic trends don't affect you; 4. Blame yourself when they do.