Two years ago, Nixzmary Brown, a seven-year-old girl in Brooklyn, New York, made the mistake of eating a cup of yogurt that her stepfather had been saving for himself. The man flew into a rage over the incident, and began bashing the child’s head against t...

Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Acadia: Ranging from desolate deserts to lush forests, huge redwood trees to rocky coastlines, America’s national parks and public lands are nothing short of awe-inspiring. The 84 million acres of unspoiled wilderne...

Whether it’s a Schnauzer who greets you with sloppy kisses every day when you come home from work, a cockatiel who can entertain your friends by whistling the Simpsons theme song, or a tarantula who gives your roommates nightmares, chances are, you’v...

Most of us assumed that slavery went out with the Civil War. But we were dead wrong.Though modern day slaves can’t be found working the fields on South Carolina plantations, you’ll find them plenty of other places. In India, children as young as five...

In Haiti, locals line up in front of bakeries to purchase mud cakes to bring home to their families. These specialties aren’t made from chocolate, as you might imagine—but from pure dirt and water, baked under the sun until hard and brittle. In a cou...

On any city street, it’s impossible to miss them: Men sprawled out in doorways or bus shelters, all their earthly possessions collected in a single garbage bag. A woman cradling a baby and an empty coffee cup, begging for spare change as you walk by.Homele...

Most Americans take water for granted. We take long, luxurious showers, plant high-maintenance flower beds, and buy expensive bottled water from far-off lands like Fiji, rather than drinking the perfectly healthy tap water available in our houses. Meanwhile, peo...

It’s been happening for centuries: The rape of Nanking. The Ottoman Empire's slaughter of more than 1.5 million Armenians. The murder of more than 9 million revolters by China’s Manchu government in the mid-19th century. And most famously, the Nazis&...

Whether your favorite reading material is The Great Gatsby or more along the lines of Good Housekeeping, chances are, reading’s a bigger part of your daily life than you realize. Even if you don’t have time to sit down with a book or magazine on a re...

In 1976, a Bangladeshi economics professor named Mohammad Yunus loaned $27 of his own money to a group of 42 female furniture-makers in a small village, who were buried in debt because of the huge interest that local moneylenders forced them to pay on loans. To ...