The Most Captivating Stories You Can't Miss This Week

Reggie Ugwu discovers how teams of anonymous, hardcore music fans are trying to solve the record industry’s toughest problem. "We’ve come to expect that virtually all of our problems can be solved with code, so much so that we summon it unthinkingly before doing almost anything...But what if music is somehow different?" Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Right after he took office, Barack Obama promised to do away with torture. But documents obtained by Ali Watkins and Aram Roston show for the first time how a harsh interrogation tactic thrived on his watch in Afghanistan. Human rights advocates said it could be inhumane and illegal. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Sean Flynn reconstructs the secret proceedings that led to the baffling decision not to indict two Cleveland police officers in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. "Grand jurors, almost without exception, follow where prosecutors lead them. And when they don’t return indictments in high-profile cases, it’s almost always because the prosecutor does not want them to." Read it at GQ.

Beimeng Fu meets Ken Roh, a South Korean immigrant who moved to the United States 43 years ago. Now, he’s running a pro–North Korea website, the most visible of a small group of Pyongyang’s devotees in the U.S. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

As Europe struggles to handle its refugee crisis, people running from the 14 year-long war in Afghanistan find themselves left on the outside. Jina Moore reports from Lesbos, Greece. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Heather Maynard, a Brooklyn nurse who sees patients through the most vulnerable time of their lives. "When dying is long it becomes ordinary, just another kind of living...In that case, it can be a good thing to see someone who is not a member of your family; who comes from the world outside your illness." Read it at The New Yorker.

Wil S. Hylton pays a visit to the acclaimed artist in the wake of his recent — and inexplicable — transformations. "With the last show there were a lot of self-­portraits, and I’ve only done self-­portraits since then. I think I’m having a conversation with myself...Facing death, or whatever the hell it is." Read it at The New York Times Magazine.

Pearl Gabel offers a deeply personal look into the lives of adults who've clung to "our earliest form of self-soothing." "Was it the thumb-sucking that made me retreat into young alienation and rebellion? Or was it my own alienation that caused me to continue sucking my thumb?" Read it at Lenny Letter.