Nepal is an astonishing country. A visit there might change your life, but the boundless poverty is likely to break your heart. The misery of the poorest Nepalis, moreover, is often compounded by predators who enrich themselves by exploiting their most vulnerable compatriots. Perhaps the worst of these malefactors are the men calling themselves “brokers” who prowl through indigent villages hoping to lure teenage girls from their homes with promises of marriage or lucrative jobs in distant lands.

Because life can be so hard in Nepal, families of teenage girls often fall prey to the brokers’ deceptions and hand over…

If David Uthlaut was still angry when the convoy finally rolled out of Magarah, Afghanistan, the young lieutenant kept his emotions hidden from the forty-four Army Rangers under his command. Certainly he had reason to be steamed. For the previous six hours his platoon had been stopped in the middle of Taliban territory while he argued with headquarters over what to do about a wrecked Humvee. When the discussion finally concluded, Uthlaut was on the losing end of the debate. …

147 years ago in a tiny Louisiana town, white supremacists committed mass murder. The aftershocks of this despicable crime are still being felt today.

By William Briggs and Jon Krakauer

An hour after sunset on Easter Sunday in 1873, a stern-wheel riverboat put ashore at Colfax, Louisiana, a ramshackle settlement surrounded by cotton plantations on the east bank of the Red River. Rain was falling. As passengers disembarked, they found themselves stumbling in the dark over what turned out to be the lifeless bodies of African-Americans who had been freed from slavery eight years earlier at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Most of the dead were lying facedown in the grass “and had been shot almost to pieces,” according to Charles Lane in…

Written as an afterword to the 1999 edition of my book about the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, here is my response to the allegations made by Anatoli Boukreev in his book, “The Climb”

In November 1997 a book titled The Climb arrived in bookstores — Anatoli Boukreev’s account of the 1996 Everest disaster, written by an American named G. Weston DeWalt. It was fascinating, for me, to read about the events of 1996 from Boukreev’s perspective. Parts of the book were powerfully told, and moved me deeply. Because Boukreev took strong exception to how he was portrayed in Into Thin Air, however, a significant portion of The Climb is devoted to defending Boukreev’s actions on Everest, challenging the accuracy of my account, and calling into question my integrity as a journalist.

Mr. DeWalt…

I was sitting at my desk in Seattle, struggling to write a crappy magazine article that would enable me to make an overdue mortgage payment, when the phone rang. The call was from Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside. His voice was animated. Skipping the small talk, he said he’d just read an odd snippet in The New York Times titled “Dying in the Wild, a Hiker Recorded the Terror.” It had been published the previous day — September 13, 1992 — and Bryant couldn’t stop thinking about it. On September 6, according to the Times piece,

a young hiker…

The recent sentencing of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner to what will probably turn out to be less than three months of jail time for sexually assaulting an unconscious 22-year-old woman has turned a bright light on the ubiquity of sexual violence at American colleges and universities. No more than 20% of rapes in the U.S. are reported to the police. Less than 5% are ever prosecuted. At most, 3% result in a conviction that includes any incarceration for the rapist.

Baffled by these disturbing numbers, I wrote my latest book — Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College…

Climbing the highest mountain in the world is an exceedingly dangerous activity. Always has been, probably always will be. I learned this the hard way when I climbed Everest on assignment for Outside magazine in 1996. During the descent, a storm took the lives of four of the five teammates who reached the summit with me. All told, by the end of that awful month twelve climbers had died.

Upon my return from Nepal I wrote a book about my experience on Everest: Into Thin Air. Below is an excerpt I’ve adapted from Chapter 13, which describes our team’s ascent…

The debate over what killed Chris McCandless, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering and occasionally flaring for more than two decades now. Shortly after the first edition of Into the Wild was published in January 1996, University of Alaska chemists Edward Treadwell and Thomas Clausen shot down my theory that the cause of McCandless’s death was a toxic alkaloid contained in the seeds of the Eskimo potato plant, Hedysarum alpine, also known as wild potato. When Treadwell and Clausen completed chemical analyses of the Eskimo potato seeds I’d sent them, they found…