Bashar al-Assad has propped up his regime by exploiting the Middle East’s love of an amphetamine called captagon.

“Hypercars” can approach or even exceed 300 m.p.h. Often costing millions of dollars, they’re ostentatious trophies—and sublime engines of innovation.

An Eritrean trafficker promised to help Africans desperate to reach Europe—then brutalized them inside a Libyan compound while extorting their families back home. With his fortune, he partied in Dubai.

Drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn’t be infiltrated by cops. They were wrong—big time.

He leads a manic, exhausting life – but when he’s guiding clubbers through one of his marathon sets it feels like time has been suspended.

Inna fled the war with her two young girls—but what would happen to her husband, her mother, and her other relatives?

The joys and absurdities of finding oneself abandoned in a desolate landscape.

Stranded in Yemen’s war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If—or when—it explodes or sinks, thousands may die.

The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped?

Three journeys from the past century—a rogue adventurer’s, my father’s, and mine—converged in the air.