Isolated Socotra, 220 miles from mainland Yemen, is home to a panoply of strange plants and animals uniquely adapted to the hot, harsh, windswept island.

Fifteen years after the handover to mainland China, Hong Kong residents worry that their identity—and their freedoms—are slipping away.

When London threw its name into the hat for the 2012 Olympics, many had doubts. Not former sport minister Tessa Jowell. Interviewing Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, and others Jowell recruited to her cause, Michael Joseph Gross details the grueling, often farcical campaign that won the city its prize—plus a $14.5 billion tab.

When Don Waters finally read the unpublished memoir given to him by his late father—an absentee figure he grew up resenting—he was shocked to learn that the old man hung with Greg Noll during surfing’s golden age in California. Sounds like grounds for a quest.

When the Costa Concordia, a floating pleasure palace carrying 4,200 people, hit a rock off the Italian coast on January 13, it became the largest passenger ship ever wrecked, supplanting the Titanic in maritime history. Bryan Burrough reconstructs an epic fight for survival—in which all too many would perish.

New Zealand is an otherworldly mashup of climates, geologies, adventures, and luxuries. (Oh, the things you can do!) Susan Hack tries it all in the Southern Hemisphere's hot zone

America may be coming to grips with the dark side of our cheapest, most abundant energy source, but a plan to unload it on Asia threatens to poison our planet.

Koalas are under siege. Can Australia rescue them?

The author packed up his house and family and moved to northeastern Brazil for a year. Fantasy or struggle? It’s complicated.

Questions I'm asking myself about the life that lies ahead.