Every weekday morning during the first few weeks of the coronavirus crisis, Bree Slovick would wake up, wash her hands, disinfect her door handles, walk her 4-year-old daughter to day care (so she didn't need to touch the car), ensure that her daughter washed her hands, and then go to work at a small company in Hopkins, Minnesota, that makes some of the most precise machine parts in the world.

The Chinese Communist Party confiscated a sacred meteorite from Muslim herders. They're suing to get it back.

Meanwhile, the director, Si Xiaodong, was performing a stunt of his own: directing a film that Chinese audiences would watch, and that Chinese authorities wouldn't censor.

Almost no one jumps on rainy days.

They jump when the sun returns and the masses step outside, reminding them of their misery. They jump during financial crises and in the early spring, when Japanese schools open and the pressures of life converge.

Gloria Capitan couldn’t have imagined her fate. Her cause felt just, and her community was behind her. Besides, who would kill a 57-year-old grandmother?

Almost everybody in Liangshan knows the story of the American slave.

“In North Korea, I lived a dog’s life,” Jenkins said in a rare interview. "Ain’t nobody live good in North Korea."

In Zamashegu, a farming community of 1,000 people in northern Ghana, they may as well have come from outer space — four electric slot machines installed in two roadside shacks, chirping and clattering, bathing the packed-dirt walls in a pale, kaleidoscopic glow.

Gitonga flipped through the channels, and Chinese programs filled the screen: an old kung fu movie, a Chinese news broadcast, a Chinese documentary about Japan’s wartime atrocities, most dubbed into English. Gitonga was elated.

Africa’s past is the mildewed train station in central Addis Ababa, where locomotives sit gutted and rusted tracks vanish in the grass.

All afternoon we obsessively checked our phones, seeking a reason — or even a clue — as to why North Korea wouldn’t let us leave.

Cambodia’s most shocking killing in years happened in broad daylight, on a muggy July morning, just as its capital city was stirring to life.

It was a road trip through one of China’s most tightly controlled regions.

The text messages arrived on Chrissy Royal’s phone at 3:23 a.m.
 

“I got arrested [help] me,” said one.

Then: “Yongsan police station.”

“In the morning, if you shoot dead people, it's gory, but at night it’s almost beautiful,” he said, clicking through photos on his laptop. “You can hide the blood, because of the shadows. It's psychedelic, the colors.”

Nobody doubted the dead man’s identity. He had been disfigured in the crash, but the white hair, the short stature — it all pointed to Ma Jixiang.

"Then, as we were pulling the boat to this port, we noticed a pair of legs sticking out from underneath, bobbing up and down with the waves."

When the Chinese took over the Las Bambas copper mine here in the Andes Mountains in 2014, Beto Chahuayllo at first barely noticed the change.

They call it "Little Mecca": a city of prayer caps and hijab, minarets and oxidized green domes.

As Li Yaqin's college-age granddaughter quietly captured her on digital camera, the 73-year-old told of watching her father starve to death.

He visited another shop on the street, then a third, and each made his skin crawl. “I thought, in such a modern society, why would this industry be so primitive and weird?”

"Here, you can get whatever you want, as long as you have the money."

When Rahmat and Afrian talk about Islamic State, their eyes widen, their speech slows, and their expressions soften into smiles.

Four Thai customs agents in a gunmetal-gray speedboat slowly circle a decrepit fishing vessel, its huge white hull streaked with filth and rust.

Last autumn, a group of Chinese real estate developers arrived in downtown Detroit for a city tour. As they walked through its small central cluster of high-rises – some in use, many long-ago abandoned – they were impressed by what they saw.

Lobsang Gyatso Sither sits at the front of a Tibetan school auditorium, the bright rectangle of his PowerPoint presentation dimly illuminating the first few rows of students before him.

From the top of the Prince of the Sky's high tower, the pavement below is a vertigo-inducing abstraction, a coarse grey expanse dotted with people-like specks.

Chen pointed with a shaky hand at the small plot of cabbage, spring onions and corn where his friend, Yu Yihong, had been stung to death by giant hornets.

"I saw a spirit riding a white horse with a flowing mane, and he told me right now, your ability as a shaman, your energy, your magic, they've improved very quickly."

Xie Zhengqiang is no stranger to death, but he trembles every time he thinks about his nephew.

Chris and Sarah recently moved into a newly renovated two-bedroom apartment in Xining, a bustling Chinese city on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, where they manage a small business and spread the teachings of Jesus Christ.

To understand this industrial Chinese city’s past, begin with the smoldering crater on the south side of town, an open-pit coal mine as wide as Manhattan and deeper than the height of the Chrysler Building.

They have toured Europe, played alongside marquee names like the band Coldplay and earned plaudits in the international press. But here in China, the growing popularity of the Mongolian rock band Hanggai has not exactly inspired adulation from the authorities.

On a cloudy day last March, a retired office clerk surnamed Sun stood outside of his courtyard home in the heart of Beijing, lit a cigarette, and tried not to dwell on the eight-acre swath of rubble down the street that used to be his neighborhood.