Tony Dokoupil

Starting PointIn spring 2003, climber Aron Ralston, then 27, was pinned for four days against a rock wall in Utah's isolated Blue John Canyon when an 800-pound boulder crushed his right hand.

Race has inevitably been part of the Democratic primary, but the candidates have largely avoided the serious topic of affirmative action.

Hillary Clinton has battled back to a virtual dead heat with Barack Obama, according to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll. And on the major issue, the economy, neither candidate is pulling ahead.

The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.

Uncle Sam wants you, but he's having trouble besting contractors for talent.

Every Super Bowl loser leaves piles of suddenly worthless merchandise in its wake, but the tease of the New England Patriots' perfect season produced unusual extremes.

World War I has no national monument. No iconic images. And only one soldier is still alive.

In the mass-media age, major news stories captivate us for a moment and then vanish. We revisit those stories to bring you the next chapter.

The rise of interfaith marriage is a sensitive issue among American Jews, and now two powerful forces in the religion are teaming up to do something about it: rabbis and JDate, the top matchmaking Web site for Jewish singles.

Americans are obsessed with saving time, but there are some things we still haven't streamlined. Like sit-down dining. In many restaurants in Europe, a waiter brings the check along with a panini-size wireless device, and customers swipe their own credit cards.

At 25, Stephen Brown thought his toy-playing days were over—until his mom tried to clean out his old bedroom. "Looking at my 'Star Wars' guys, I couldn't pull the trigger," says the Atlanta advertising executive, now 34.

Starting Point In September 2006, Florida Rep. Mark Foley, who as head of the Caucus on Exploited and Missing Children called pedophiles "America's most depraved," is caught sending explicit e-mails and instant messages to teen male congressional pages.

In the mass-media age, news stories captivate us for a moment, then vanish. We revisit those stories to bring you the final chapter.

Jennifer Lopez kept the tabloids abuzz with pregnancy rumors for months, in part because of an unlikely accomplice: high fashion. Baby-doll tops, smock dresses and other free-flowing styles that keep expanding bellies under wraps are a hit with fashionable pregnant and nonpregnant women alike.

The idea that genetic differences exist between ethnicities is the basis of a growing and controversial advertising strategy for a $2 trillion market. Much of the money is tied to skin-care supplies, such as Rx for Brown Skin, a line that debuted this fall at Sephora.

Al Gore just won a Nobel Prize for teaching the world to think green, but he's also showing he knows a thing or two about another kind of green: money. Since 2000, according to published reports, the former veep has transformed himself from a public servant with around $1 million in the bank to a sparkling private consultant with a net worth estimated to be north of $100 million.

When biologist James Watson suggested that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans, he sparked an international race row that forced him into a hasty retirement.

Starting PointAfter Chandra Levy—a 24-year-old D.C. intern from California Rep. Gary Condit's district—goes missing in 2001, and later turns up murdered, suspicion falls on Condit.

In a new book, 21 celebrities tell sweet, funny—and revealing—tales of their own bar (or bat) mitzvahs.

Mariane Pearl, the wife of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, resolved to hold onto her sense of hope in the aftermath of her husband's murder at the hands of terrorists in 2002.

Shrewd marketing or government spite? That was the question when Valerie Plame's memoir, "Fair Game," appeared on bookstands last month with some 10 percent of its 302 pages deleted by CIA censors.

In this country, we're firm believers in educating ourselves—we just wish it didn't take so long. But not to worry: self-help is on the way. David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim's "The Intellectual Devotional: American History" collapses Uncle Sam's story into 365 single-page passages to be read one a day for a year. "We're trying to give people confidence," says Oppenheim, a producer for NBC's "Today" show. "The War of 1812 can seem exotic at first." The Web site Dailylit, meanwhile, sends...

A bipartisan plan to calm Washington's ideological wars.

Wild mustangs carried pioneers, cowboys and soldiers. Today, they're being sold for slaughter. An American dilemma.

At least one mainstream publisher is so attracted by the recent success of people publishing themselves that the company is partnering with a self-publishing outfit.

On July 10, Jeremy Blake returned to his downtown Manhattan apartment from a day of meetings with plans to relax with a bottle of Scotch. The 35-year-old digital artist, whose work is already enshrined in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, lived in a converted Episcopal church rectory with his girlfriend of a dozen years, Theresa Duncan, a 40-year-old writer and former computer-game designer.

The suicide rate for young people increased for the first time in nearly 15 years. What's going on? And what do worried parents need to watch out for?

Theresa Duncan created acclaimed videogames. Jeremy Blake was a digital-art pioneer. They were talented, successful and in love. And then they committed suicide. How the technology that infused their work helped destroy them.

When people speak of hearing God, they usually don't mean they can adjust the volume. But a wave of new audio Bibles with Hollywood talent, chintzy sound effects and overwrought musical scores is bringing God into the MP3 era—and they couldn't have more different, well, complexions.

Seventeen-year-old Michael didn't want to end up crazed and suicidal like the Columbine killers. The Massachusetts teen had read that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were taking antidepressants when they rampaged murderously through their Colorado high school in 1999, and he didn't want to snap as they had. "He'd say it was like there was an evil guy on his left shoulder and a good guy on his right, but the evil guy just kept winning," Michael's mother, Lorraine, recalls.