Perfectly Awesome

Putin had Christo Grozev in his sights. Grozev was way ahead of him.

Robert Pollard adores him. Jeff Tweedy calls him a hero. But he’s just wanted to be left alone — until now.

The death of Parton’s husband, in March, called rare attention to a steadfast union that the fame-friendly country star had kept private for decades.

May 9, 2025 – “The Guide is either the train hopper’s Bible or an outdated relic, a must-have or a crutch, depending on whom you ask.”

Six years after 41 people died aboard a Sukhoi Superjet on a Moscow runway, the full story of that horrible day can finally be told.

A huge collection of cinematic nonfiction

With the arrival of Thank You Please Come Again, our new book by Kate Medley, we present its opening essay.

The candid Mets legend reflects on his Cinderella career and indelible place in the pop-culture pantheon.

One Easter Sunday, the Alaska Ranger—a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor—went down in the Bering Sea, 6,000 feet deep and thirty-two degrees cold. Forty-seven people were on board, and nearly half of them would spend hours floating alone in the darkness, in water so frigid it can kill a man in minutes. Forty-two of them would be rescued. Here’s how.

Once a subject of Victorian fascination, the mokele-mbembe myth is now fodder for creationists on a quest to disprove Darwinism

"There’s something about the thrill of discovery that can make a person believe what they’ve found is theirs now—to claim, to guard, to name."

A Florida family coaxes earthworms from the forest floor.

In late February of 2020 I traveled home to Pittsburgh to salvage what I could of my grandparents’ lives. After caring for them and their things during their final years and after, my aunt was moving to Florida and giving it all away: furniture and dinnerware; my grandmother’s full collection of Emmett Kelly clown figurines;

Among the vineyards and fruit farms of South Africa’s Western Cape, the mysterious death of a farmworker reveals a violent history.

The time I spent working on the Canadian National Railroad changed the course of my life.

Noah Musingku made a fortune with a Ponzi scheme and then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he still commands the loyalty of his Bougainville subjects

He is Silicon Valley’s favourite economist. Does his lust for knowledge have a place in the age of AI?

"Maybe it's only when you don’t know what you are listening for that you find what you were waiting all along to discover."

On our first memories

Alan Lomax was a legendary collector of folk music, author, broadcaster, oral historian, musicologist, and filmmaker who raised the profile of folk music worldwide.

Six stories on our fascination with knots.

From food to Freud to football, 10 lists for 10 years

How I (possibly) solved a cold case on my summer vacation.

And other oxymoronic observations about the oeuvre of Ron Oliver, the Hallmark Channel’s most prolific, flamboyant and unapologetically sappy director

No one in my family wanted to talk about Harold’s life as a contract killer for the Mob. Then one day he called me.

It’s time to take a comprehensive look at one of America’s most controversial plane crashes, and ask how it ended up that way.

On the insatiable hunger for belonging.

They led a cycling revolution in a country where women were forbidden to ride. When the Taliban returned to power, their only hope was a harrowing escape to an uncertain future.

Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure—without leaving dry land.

For 50 years, a secretive group of government workers has been preparing for the worst. Here's a rare look inside the team that's ready to respond to a nuclear incident anywhere, anytime.

The entire world’s population of Przewalski’s horses once dwindled to a mere dozen. So how did a pair named Fiona and Shrek end up in livestock auctions in the West?

Newly released data from a giant whirlpool near the Paracel Islands could give fresh clues about a major US Navy incident.

Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab

Don Luigi Ciotti leads an anti-Mafia organization, and for decades he has run a secret operation that liberates women from the criminal underworld.

'The world owes me nothing.'

Because sometimes you have to fact-check your grandmother

After this walkaround, you'll love the rig, too.

It was a stunning revelation: A respected high school custodian had been a concentration camp guard. This excerpt of a new book examines how the disclosure of a dark secret in the early ’80s divided a suburb.

For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe.

'God's Quarterback' was the archetype American success story, but the triumphs everyone saw masked the inner turmoil no one knew about.

We all need picked up out of a roadside ditch now and then

Works in Progress is an online magazine dedicated to sharing new and underrated ideas to improve the world, and features original writing from some of the most interesting thinkers in the world.

In 2013, Emma Carey went skydiving for the first time and experienced an absolute nightmare. This is why she refuses to let the accident define her.

Lee Maxwell owns a Guinness-world-record-holding washing machine collection. When his wife of 71 years died, he was left to ponder what his life would look like.

Walking and talking with my friend Dawn.

After a crucial section of a California freeway collapsed, this formidable construction boss pulled off one of the fastest, riskiest, most high-stakes reconstructions in U.S. history.

"There is a fine line between losing yourself and finding your deepest truths."

In 1746, a vessel called the Prince de Conty foundered off the coast of France. How did its most valuable cargo end up in the hands of a semi-retired Florida couple?

He was a convicted felon who found a niche in Seattle’s construction boom. Then a fatal boating accident came for Michael Powers’s fairy-tale ending.

By Dean Bakopoulos

A Post reporter embedded with Michigan prosecutors for two years as they pursued homicide charges against Jennifer and James Crumbley, whose son killed four students at Oxford High School.

Why one tiny newspaper in Whitesburg, Kentucky still screams for press freedom despite arson, abuse from the public and financial challenges.

From Shirley Jackson's ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’, of course.

The long read: I was once Ireland’s No 1 player, and tried for years to climb the global ranks. But life at the bottom of the top can be brutal

Don Estridge broke all of Big Blue's rules to create the home computer. The company would never forgive him for it.

American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot -- and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.

“As a doctor, she had already faced misogyny in the French medical corps. But she persevered. It would be no different for her as a rescue pilot.” By Charles Morgan Evans AT A remote French...

A herd of elephants halfway around the world gave an adopted Dallas woman the home she always wanted.

Its agents are often depicted as malevolent puppet masters—or as bumbling idiots. The truth is even less comforting.

As she prepares for the Paris Games, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist talks about the doping accusations against her competitors and how she stays focused while swimming 1,900 miles a year.

For Jock Sutherland, being hailed as the world’s best surfer was just one phase in an unlikely life.

Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century.

With US detainees being held in Russia, Gaza, and Venezuela, VF embedded with the team tasked with gaining their freedom.

Zach Horwitz came to Los Angeles hoping to make it in the movies. He ended up running a seven-hundred-million-dollar scam, defrauding a sprawling group of investors, starting with his best friends.

A friendship born out of the ruins of a nation, a dangerous journey home, and a 40-year search for the truth.

The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare

A famous case study helped spark a myth about a man who could not forget. But the truth is more complicated.

Is the killer behind the 1982 Tylenol poisonings still on the loose? Exclusive revelations by investigators yield the first authoritative account of what happened and who likely did it.

A multicultural, interfaith family in 1970s San Francisco reported a series of unexplained phenomena. Then a priest with a dark past stepped up.

My friend called to say he saw me on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel’s final episode. It was a retrospective of the best of the 29 years of the show and my story made the cut. What hard-hitting piece of journalism landed me that honor? What story brought Andrea Kremer and crew across the country […]

I also helped undress him so he could lie down

Some say the true death worm has already been found—slithering beneath the sands of the Gobi.

What pushed an East Texas mother to kidnap at gunpoint the director of the famed college drill team and her nineteen-year-old daughter?

From 1993: Nearly every day for decades, Irving V. Link tanned by the luxury pool, Adam Gopnik writes. Then his idyllic life style came under threat from the hotel’s owner, the Sultan of Brunei.

The two disappearances of Tom Phillips and his children.

Against the odds, a tiny Icelandic town speaks of a local Black ancestor. Geneticists and historians combine forces to uncover the man’s eventful life.

"For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name."

From 2008: What was real about the realest actor of them all? Claudia Roth Pierpont on Brando’s dilemmas and his depths.

Friends and family of late singer Nicolette Larson remember her brilliant voice, and the ups and downs of a life that ended far too soon.

What is it about the once virtually unknown song that inspires so many musicians to make it their own?

Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial.

On a calm, clear day, USAir Flight 427 suddenly nosedived and smashed into the earth, killing everyone on board. A team of investigators quickly assembled to sift through the rubble.

She overcame trust issues and chartered a yacht. Now Caitlin Clark is ready for March.

The Netflix series “Sunderland ’Til I Die” serves as a thesis both for fandom and for the inevitability of its disappointments.

A city that pro basketball abandoned in the early 1970s, and whose college teams have only flirted with relevance for decades, has basketball roots that run deep.

Here’s a riddle. There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military campaign, and sometimes even a motivation for starting a war. Improvements to the preparation and uses of this product would have increased population size and would have had a general and noticeable impact on people’s living standards. And this product underwent dramatic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming an obsession for many inventors and industrialists, while seemingly not featuring in many estimates of historical economic output or growth at all.

"Five generations of a family's love, told through a bicycle."

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives

A case study digs into the medical records of a lost diver’s incredible survival story.

Oddities, marvels and revelations proliferate in groves of the tallest trees on the planet.

Does the director of “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Gladiator” see himself in the hero of his epic new film?

Mike Favor spent 13 years addicted to cocaine. Running a shelter for abandoned and abused dogs has helped him and others stay sober. But it hasn’t been easy.

These days, when you work as a librarian in America, there is no lack of emergencies.

Meet Marina Hadjipateras: Greek shipping heiress, successful venture capitalist, and the woman trying to transform the $14 trillion shipping industry.

After Zac Brettler mysteriously plummeted into the Thames, his grieving parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son. Would the police help them solve the puzzle of his death?

Rats are less pestilent and more lovable than we think. Can we learn to live with them?

Claims that a recent undersea discovery may be Amelia Earhart’s long-lost aeroplane raise questions. Experts weigh in on the mystery that continues to captivate us.

“If you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back.”…

Memories of her son helped Blackjack to become the sole survivor of an ill-fated expedition to Wrangel Island.

Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiaq woman who married at 16 and had three children before her husband abandoned her. Only one child survived infancy, and he suffered from tuberculosis. Blackjack walked 40 miles to Nome, Alaska, carrying her son Bennett in order to place him in an orphanage, because she couldn't afford his medical treatment. She desperately wanted him back, and that's why she signed on to the doomed 1921 expedition that Vilhjalmur Stefansson organized to explore the possibility of a colon...

“I was all of the things people are when they’re 14 or 15” — except a decade younger.

WW2 spy Phyllis Latour has died aged 102. Now the full story of her wartime career can be told.

The versatile comedian became the ultimate showman. But Billy Crystal was never putting on an act.

A man passes away without a word in the mountains of North Carolina, and his grandson sets out to write about the importance of a seemingly unimportant life.

After the 2022 All-Star Game, Morant's misconduct became more frequent -- and dangerous. Since then, serious allegations have emerged. Lawsuits and subpoenas remain open. And a 24-year-old superstar's career is on the brink.

A lifetime after the Holocaust, a few of its perpetrators remain at large. German detectives are making a final push to hunt them down.

Could a theory from the science of perception help crack the mysteries of psychosis?

How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

What successful entrepreneurs have in common.

Kyle de Rothschild Deschanel was an instant New York sensation who seemed to live on a 24/7 carousel of mega-dollar deals and raucous parties. Then his best friend found an ID marked “Aryeh Dodelson.”

"It's hard to say Ian Spector officially invented the meme. But he was, at minimum, a key early influencer."

I had never had money, and then I did. For three days in New York, I learned how not to use it.

When the pandemic came, Becky Wilkes moved her enfeebled mom and dad into her own home. Her series “Till Death Do Us Part” documents that time.

A classic ghost story has something to say about America—200 years ago, 100 years ago, and today.

An inside account of how Air Force pararescue jumped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to reach an injured sailor.

My town, once celebrated for its laid-back weirdness, is now a turbocharged tech megalopolis being shaped by exiles from places like Silicon Valley.

The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them.

In a series of emotional interviews, the unconventional senator opens up about his battle with depression.

For some of us, dark times call for dark reads.

Once the next big thing in American sports, Jai Alai has all but completely disappeared over the past 20 years. But in Miami, the game is still played for much smaller crowds and stakes.

Venture inside the minds of some of the greatest scammers.

A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.

As the emirate’s ruler espoused gender equality, four royal women staked their lives on escaping his control.

Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.

The powerful moral message of FX’s hit show.

"She threw herself into bonding with a breed of horse that seems touched by Viking spirit."

The mysterious neighbor claimed to have witnessed a nuclear detonation, marched on Selma and acted on Broadway. Would an overlooked form letter be her downfall?

During Anne Rapp’s Hollywood career, she worked with the biggest names in movies. Now, at 72, she’s ready to tell her own stories about her Panhandle upbringing.

The only thing more fun than the rides themselves is this guy’s staggering analysis of them.

Interviews and e-mails with expedition leaders and employees reveal how OceanGate ignored desperate warnings from inside and outside the company. “It’s a lemon,” one wrote.

King Abdullah allegedly imprisoned four of his daughters. After his death, the princesses’ supporters say, they disappeared.

While my uncle was dying from a rare cancer, he found solace in a hotel whose staff became a surrogate family.

Ocean creatures soak up huge amounts of humanity’s carbon mess. Should we value them like financial assets?

The troubadour of mellow vibes has been one of the biggest acts in music for three decades. Now 56, Matthews has been singing about mortality for a long time, and he’s confronting its specter in new and surprising ways.

There was a flash of blue and a surge of radioactive heat. Nine days later, Louis Slotin was dead.

After the tourists go home, a museum’s collection tells its own story.

In the woods near her home, Lucy Jones discovers the magic of slime molds and becomes entangled in their fluid, nonbinary way of being.

Language lessons with an extraordinary ape.

Ken Eto rose through the ranks of the Chicago mob, and then it tried to kill him. The underworld would never be the same.

A tale of disaster, survival, and ghosts.

The long read: A series of financial scandals have rocked Italy’s most glamorous club. But is the trouble at Juventus symptomatic of a deeper rot in world football?

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.

Runa Sandvik has made it her life’s work to protect journalists against cyberattacks. Authoritarian regimes are keeping her in business.

On the French Riviera and Italian coast, in the yacht clubs and shimmering ballrooms, everyone, including Pamela Anderson, wanted to get close to the prince. So did investigators. The story of Stefano Cernetic.

Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who died recently, wrote pieces that were elegiac, but suffused with a sense of survival: we are broken, we are wounded, we carry on.

The fragrant fruit hid a dark secret.

Days before entering space, Yuri Gagarin writes a letter to be opened in the event of his death

On November 28, 1787, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty set sail from England with 46 men aboard, bound for the island of Tahiti in the South Pacific. Commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, her mission was to collect and deliver breadfruit plants to the West Indies, where they would serve as cheap food for slaves on British plantations. After a long [...]

In 1970s Bali, a sudden rice crisis prompted an unexpectedly far-reaching scientific discovery

Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.

In 1976, Suzanne Heywood’s father decided to take the family on a three-year sailing ‘adventure’ – and then just kept going. It was a journey into fear, isolation and danger …

The long read: Elvira and her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, were left at a train station in Barcelona aged two, four and five. As an adult, when Elvira decided to look for her parents, she discovered a family history wilder than anything she had imagined

Every winter, Ivrea erupts into a ferocious three-day festival where its citizens pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges. (Yes, oranges.)

What can elephants, birds, and flamenco players teach a neuroscientist-composer about music?

In the spring of 1961, Georges Lemay, a dapper thirty-six-year-old French Canadian, spent his days holed up in his cottage on a private island on a river in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montre…

A legendary singer on faith, loss, and a family legacy.

The science of the perfect second

Tomb raiders, crooked art dealers, and museum curators fed billionaire Michael Steinhardt’s addiction to antiquities. Many also happened to be stolen.

Kaminsky bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man...

Paul Laurence Dunbar became the first Black writer to earn international acclaim through his poetry, essays and musical lyrics.

The comedian and podcast host—and bonafide scam expert—shares her favorite capers, along with what makes them so irresistible.

A surprising number of people experience symptoms of this curious condition, which is named after Lewis Carroll's heroine, who changed size after eating and drinking.

Most mammals, including our closest living relatives, have fur. So why did we lose ours?

The author spoke with WIRED about her new short story collection "Old Babes in the Wood," crypto, the end of Roe v. Wade, and what’s left to inspire hope.

Stolz, the 18-year-old from Wisconsin, won three gold medals at the speedskating world championships, finishing his turns in a way that seemed like something out of a storybook.

People my age are described as baby boomers, but our experiences call for a different label altogether.

Pets left behind when people fled the disaster in 1986 seem to have seeded a unique population.

A woman, an elephant, andan uncommon love story spanningnearly half a century.

The long read: What do you say to someone whose wife prefers photographs of deceased authors to him?

The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German élite. But a reporter discovered that behind the façade of innovation were lies and links to Russian intelligence.

After his brother’s death, Patrick Bringley took a job at the grandest place he could find.

Erik Sowinski is a professional pacer, a talented runner who is in high demand on starting lines, and nowhere to be found at the finish.

Why is everyone waxing on about Diptyque?

When the top teams in Greece meet, the story lines, and the rivalries, regularly extend far beyond the soccer field.

The modern world uses shocking amounts of steel.

The long read: For the ultra-wealthy and the super-famous, regular therapy won’t do

When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.

The members of the Ryuyukai have done nearly 100 years of hard time. Now they’re just looking to stay out of trouble.

Humanity's engineering achievements have been extraordinary, so why has building an artificial heart has proved to be more challenging than expected.

Gary Hunt is an enigma. He trains with the intensity of a modern athlete, but relaxes like a sportsman of a bygone era. He is fiercely competitive but unbelievably laid-back. How did he become the greatest cliff diver of all time?

George Stebbins was tearing down a stone wall in the cellar of his home in Northfield, Massachusetts when he uncovered the bones. A skull emerged first, then the spine and the bones of the arms and…

Local sleuths help find a suspect in gay porn actor Bill Newton's murder. His dismembered head and feet were found in a Hollywood dumpster in 1990.

The long read: In 2016, artist César Aréchiga talked one of Mexico’s most dangerous maximum security prisons into letting him run art classes for its inmates, many of them violent gang members. Could he really change their lives?

Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi’s forgeries infiltrated museums, auction houses and private collections. A decade after their conviction, psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer asks: Why did they do it?

After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act.

Follow these tips and tricks to becoming beloved at your local watering hole from the guy who literally wrote the book.

He won four Super Bowls and retired as the undisputed greatest. What came next was turning a legacy into a life.

She had perhaps the largest personal dictionary collection in the world. It is certainly the most titillating.

Until people started breaking out into hideous rashes.

The story of Lacey, and why I had to kill her.

In September 2022, after watching many YouTube videos of other people on long-distance Amtrak trips, I finally embarked on a journey of my own. I took the Amtrak Southwest Chief train from Chicago to Los Angeles. Continue reading to learn more about it and why I'll do it again on another route.

Pig-Pen was dirty — visibly so... That’s who and how he was. And yet — what was that dirtiness? Was it essential or incidental? How did it work?

No great stagnation in home espresso

David and Jeannie Smith gave up their day jobs for a life of daredevil stunts —with six children in tow. Five decades, thousands of cannon shots and multiple Guinness World Records later, this stupendous family business is still defying gravity and all

He’s trusted to repair some of the world’s most fabled — and expensive — instruments. How does John Becker manage to unlock the sound of a Stradivarius?

Tagimoucia is so rare that it only grows on one of Fiji's 330 islands, it's found high atop a steep mountain ridge and it blooms for less than three months a year.

Anne-Elisabeth Hagen, 68, was married to one of the wealthiest men in Norway. But four years ago, she disappeared, and police still have no solid leads. The entire country has been obsessed by the case ever since.

While the superstition isn’t widespread, the age-old tradition of hanging up door gods still endures during Lunar New Year.

The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler [Hager, Thomas] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain. Were you entitled to it? Was it real?

I wasn’t prepared for the challenges I would face as a priest during COVID-19

Nature - A boost to the ratings.

Heirs to an iconic fortune sought out a wealth manager who would assuage their progressive consciences. Now their dispute is exposing dynastic secrets.

The Paris-Dakar rally has an insane history of adventure, but none greater in triumph or tragedy than the 1986 running.

Eleven-year-old Victoria has her sights set on playing Little League with the boys. She goes through tryouts and is told to learn to cook…

The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from growth and decision-making to business, finance, startups, and technology. In addition, subscribers receive The Friday Five, a weekly newsletter with five ideas curated to spark curiosity headed into the weekend.

Dave Bresnahan never made it past AA, but, thanks to a specially prepared potato, he holds a place in baseball lore

Catapult publishes literary fiction and artful narrative nonfiction that engages with our Perception Box, the powerful metaphor we use to define the structure and boundaries of how we see others in th

Researchers are pursuing age-old questions about the nature of thoughts—and learning how to read them.

When a 24-year-old Denver soldier was shot and killed by military police near his base in Texas in 1942, his family and friends suspected the official story wasn’t complete. They were right.

She died in 1959, at age 12. But for Catholics in her Louisiana community, that was just the beginning of her incredible story — and a decades-long fight to make her a saint.

Was banishment from the Garden too tough a punishment for Adam and Eve? And other parental conundrums.

Along the country’s seven-hundred-mile front line, constant artillery fire and drone surveillance have made it excruciatingly difficult to maneuver.

His daring raids in World War I made him a legend. But in the Middle East today, the desert warrior’s legacy is written in sand

Advanced technologies like A.I. are enabling scientists to learn that the world is full of intelligent creatures with sophisticated languages, like honeybees. What might they tell us?

How one billionaire with a savior complex and a voracious sexual appetite got conned by his best friend, who saw him as the perfect mark.

On the road with the band in its forty-first year.

Olivia Potts | Longreads | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,649 words) It’s six in the morning, and Robert Booth has already been on the road for three hours. Sitting alongside him in the cab of his lorry (the British term for a truck) is Louis, Robert’s small dog, a Jack Russell-chihuahua mix, and a washing-up bowl […]

Master falconer Alina Blankenship and her mélange of raptors have become the protectors of some of Oregon's top vineyards.

When Eric Borsuk went to prison with his two best friends, they found their ‘bid’ — their purpose — together. Then one day, everything changed.

On October 30, 2002, a cancer-stricken Warren Zevon returned to the ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ stage for one last performance. Twenty years later, Letterman and more remember the gravitas and emotion of that stunning night.

The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

Suzanne Wooten did the impossible and became the first candidate to defeat a sitting judge in Collin County. What followed is the unbelievable, epic tale of the craziest case in the history of jurisprudence.

Scientists are grasping for any example that could help anticipate the future of Covid, even a mysterious respiratory pandemic that spread in the late 19th century.

Birgit Thyssen-Bornemisza led a life of eccentric anonymity and shabby gentility. Then her money got cut off. Then she had a stroke.

The explorer’s grandfather travelled higher than anyone; his father went deeper. Now it was his turn to make a mark.

Scientist Gary Marcus argues that “deep learning” is not the only path to true artificial intelligence.

Over the course of his chariot racing career, Gaius Appuleius Diocles won almost 60,000 lbs of gold. What did he do with it? Who knows.

And what it tells us about his creativity

Susie Goodall wanted to circumnavigate the globe in her sailboat without stopping. She didn’t bargain for what everyone else wanted.

Native people have lived in the Big Bend region for thousands of years. Who should claim their remains?

They shut down patient care and put lives at risk. Would the pandemic finally slow them down?

An obscure software system synchronizes the network’s clocks. Who will keep it running?

Behold choanoflagellates, tiny creatures that can be one body and many bodies all at once.

A collector thought he had bought a painting by the celebrated British artist. How far would he go to prove it?

He was a jovial Lower East Side gangster, wartime chemical researcher and secretive color television pioneer. An inquisitive daughter wants the full story, but this ninety-three-year-old would rather drink his coffee and read his book in peace.

People say farmers aren’t supposed to get emotionally attached to livestock. Uh-huh. When fate sent our writer two newborn sheep with life-threatening birth defects, that kind of thinking was banished from the barn.

It’s the first book many babies receive as a gift, and one of the few that parents will keep when their child is grown. Why does this 75-year-old story have such staying power?

To save endangered eels, researchers have been working for decades to figure out where they reproduce.

Physicians suffer one of the highest burnout rates among professionals. Dr. Kimberly Becher, one of two family practitioners in Clay County, West Virginia, learned the hard way.

Why do so many accomplished chefs call Popeyes their favorite fried chicken?

A new film stars Viola Davis as the leader of the Agojie, the all-woman army of the African kingdom of Dahomey

Afewerki’s attack on Tigray is the culmination of the Eritrean dictator’s ambition to become master of the Horn of Africa.

Humans are social creatures, and loneliness can be debilitating — yet, many have discovered solace in the solitary life.

Before the industrial revolution, there had been a significant increase in machinery use in Europe. Why not in China?

The American chestnut tree used to grow throughout the eastern U.S., but was devastated by a blight in the early 20th century.

Math provokes dread in so many people—yet we are all born with a sense for numbers.

In the Panhandle, where swarms of lionfish gobble up native species, a tournament offers cash prizes to divers skilled at spearing one predator after another.

Why are we so dismissive of simple solutions?

The story of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table has captivated us for a thousand years. But is there any truth behind the tales?

The zipper is one of those inventions—along with the bicycle—that seems as though it should have occurred much earlier in history. How complicated...

An education in “juice,” how to protect your shins, and keeping 12,000 daily tons of garbage at bay.

Scientists are using machine learning to eavesdrop on naked mole rats, fruit bats, crows and whales — and to communicate back.

In the moments before entering every supercell thunderstorm, there’s a moment of pause that washes over me. It usually comes as daylight vanishes, a few seconds after I turn on my headlights; just …

The most important lessons from history are the takeaways that are so broad they can apply to other fields, other…

Plant and Krauss discuss their first album together in 15 years, their 'happily incompatible' friendship and, of course, the chances of a Led Zeppelin reunion.

The story of Josephine Baker.

As he approaches 90, even brushes with death can’t keep him off the road — or dim a late-life creative burst.

A virtuous person respects the rules. So when should the same person make a judgment call and break or bend them instead?

Did the artist paint a security camera (or a condom, or a portrait of rigatoni) into “The Red Studio”? An investigation at MoMA looks for clues.

The tons of contraband lunch meat seized at the U.S.-Mexico border tell us something about the market value of nostalgia.

It’s time to ditch the biological clock, run to the nearest fair and jump back on that metaphoric roller-coaster known as your life

Eight radio stations in Southern Louisiana still broadcast partially in French as they try to keep alive a dying language in the area. French has been spoken there since the mid-1700s.

The best science fiction books of all time push the envelope, show what could be, and make you question what's possible.

The most influential sci-fi books of all time examine humanity's longest-held hopes and deepest, most visceral fears.

From sci fi romance to science fantasy and sci fi horror, those genre-blending science fiction books have something for every reader.

These hidden gems are all great works of imagination set near and far that you need to add to your TBR ASAP.

It has often been described as a “miracle” that most of Denmark’s Jews escaped the Holocaust. Now it seems that the country’s Nazi rulers deliberately sabotaged their own operation.

Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds.

Mischievousness requires humour, wit and a playful humaneness: qualities that make for a particular kind of virtue

Cheese, curry, beer: We can thank our ancestors who put food scraps to creative use. What we’re leaving our children is garbage.

After decades of exhaustive study, scientists have determined that human tetrachromacy is real. It comes in two forms -- and one can actually be an acquired trait.

The legendary Dodgers broadcaster, who died Tuesday at age 94, was a modern Socrates, only more revered. He was simultaneously a giant and our best friend.

Fifty years ago, a minor league game in Midland was postponed for the rarest of reasons—a swarm of grasshoppers biblical in its proportions.

Oceans also have their vigilantes.

Famed American biologist Patricia Wright explores an astonishing breadth of biodiversity in the wilderness of Madagascar

Fruit fans, assemble.

They’ve roamed free for hundreds of years, but is that freedom harming the ecosystem they call home?

You can't make this shit up

Lately, something has changed. Lately, I've been reacting to fancy coffee the same way a child reacts to an accidental sip of red wine mistaken for grape juice. I don't know when it happened, but I've devolved into an unexpected love affair with bad coffee. It's not just instant coffee that I hanker for each morning, either, it's any subpar coffee I can get my hands on.

Football in Russia was booming after the 2018 World Cup - now, thanks to the invasion of Ukraine, it promises to keep on shrinking

Hotel guests leave behind millions of half-used bars of soap every day. A nonprofit is on a mission to repurpose them.

From a neurological and evolutionary perspective, music is fascinating. There seems to be a deeply rooted biological appreciation for tonality, rhythm, and melody. Not only can people find certain sequences of sounds to be pleasurable, they can powerfully evoke emotions. Music can be happy, sad, peaceful, foreboding, energetic or comical. Why is this? Music is

Some of the world's most celebrated authors have written manuscripts that won't be published for a century – why? Richard Fisher visits the Future Library in Oslo to find out.

In a new documentary, fans and experts explore the legacy of a song that was originally shunned before becoming a timeless classic

He sold 12 million copies of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Then he started taking his own advice.

A chance encounter with a rare phenomenon called a milky sea connects a sailor and a scientist to explain the ocean’s ghostly glow.

Participants in the Tennessee race must negotiate extreme temperatures, wild terrain and more than 50,000 feet of accumulated ascent

Hidden in the tusk of a 34-year-old mastodon was a record of time and space that helped explain his violent death.

Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

In his new book, An Immense World, science writer Ed Yong explores the diversity of perception in the animal world — including echolocation, magnetic fields and ultraviolet vision.

Legions of the sick and elderly go to great lengths to die in India’s holiest city. One mysterious woman guards this fiery entrance to eternal bliss.

In a showdown between Russia and NATO, the ‘Suwałki Gap’ would likely be the first point of contact.

Tales of odd phenomena stoke our imagination even as they tease us.

Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds

Five years ago, the flight vanished into the Indian Ocean. Officials on land know more about why than they dare to say.

Christine Schreyer is a linguistic anthropologist who researches the people who invent new tongues and seek to sustain ancient ones.

Every creature lives within its own sensory bubble, but only humans have the capacity to appreciate the experiences of other species. What we’ve learned is astounding.

Jumbo Floating Restaurant, which closed in 2020, capsized in the South China Sea after being towed from the city. The sinking triggered nostalgia for a happier period of Hong Kong history.

Three sisters braved lions, crocodiles, poachers, raging rivers and other dangers on a 1,300-mile transnational effort to forge a new dynasty.

What happens when we talk to animals?

'I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting.'

Whether you want to find joy in your body, or just greater self-acceptance, these four strategies from psychologists and activists — and, yes, nudists — might help.

After learning she doesn’t have long to live, a woman composes a dating profile for the man she will leave behind.

"We figured the best way to make the audience understand—and care—would be to connect his house to a relationship, and unfinished business," says director Pete Docter

An ex-Soviet state’s national myths—as well as the forces of nationalism, economics, culture, and religion—all pull it away from Moscow. Can Russia really compete?

Tartine, a beloved San Francisco bakery, wanted to grow. Partnering with a developer was one way to rise.

Near Fort Stockton, Hoven Riley has been quietly growing more than 20,000 of the prized plants, which are being illicitly uprooted from public and private lands to meet a growing demand.

The Texas gambler has been winning at poker for seventy years—long enough to become an icon and watch an outlaw’s game become an industry.

While spooks, treasure hunters, and lawyers search for cash, gold, and antiquities, Libya offers a lesson—and 1,001 cautionary tales—about how to recoup loot from kleptocrats.

When vast gas reserves were discovered off the idyllic coast of northern Mozambique, a crew of roughnecks flew in from around the world to make their fortunes. But in March 2021, Islamist rebels attacked, and the foreigners and thousands of Mozambicans were abandoned. Two hundred holed up at the Amarula Lodge, where the expats faced a choice: save themselves, or risk it all to save everyone. As oil and gas fuel a new war in Europe, Alex Perry pieces together, shot by shot, a stunning morality tale for the global economy.

"Jail is its own kingdom. The basic rules of engagement do not apply here," Keri Blakinger writes in this excerpt from her new memoir.

The big-wave surfer tackles some of the most fearsome swells on the planet. On the surface, it looks like he’s just having fun.

Enormous container ships ferry goods all over the world, but when one of them gets into trouble – as happened with the Ever Given and Ever Forward recently – how can they be saved?

You might not recognize the name Wendy Froud (née Midener), but in the practical effects world, she’s a legend. Her work even earned her one of pop culture’s greatest monikers: the Mother of Yoda.

“I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds.”

Smithsonian’s James Deutsch says that behind the character in the Marvel Studios series lies the oft-told story of “guile” outsmarting authority.

The Harvard-trained lawyer and professional baseball player Eddie Grant volunteered to serve in World War I. He fought as he'd played: selflessly

From Washington Irving to Kristen Roupenian.

Loren Bouchard’s accidental career as a comedy mogul has now brought his TV family to the big screen.

In December 1997, a tiger prowled the outskirts of a small town in Russia's Far East. In his book The Tiger, John Vaillant re-creates the events of that terrifying winter in an environment where man and tiger live side-by-side.

The story of See’s Candies reminds us of the importance of consistency, quality, and long-term growth in investing.

Spotting smoke from towers on high peaks could have been deemed ‘man’s work,’ but a few pioneers paved the way for generations of women to do the job.

Recorded during several hedonistic months in a fabulous Cote d’Azur villa, Exile on Main St is seen as the Stones’ epic, creative peak. As the classic album turns 50, stars tell us how it got their rocks off

Nearly 14 years after his death, his provocative humor has been embraced by people across the political spectrum. What happens when comedy outlasts the era it was made for?

In December, a photographer set off on a 2,600-mile road trip, traveling from the Yemeni border to the Strait of Hormuz. Here’s what she saw.

When Russia attacked Kyiv, Ukrainians dropped everything to protect the city—and to ease one another’s suffering.

A faraway island in Alaska has had its share of visitors, but none can remain for long on its shores.

Welcome to Video’s customers thought their payments were untraceable. They couldn’t have been more wrong. The untold story of the case that shredded the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity.

Exotic lumber salvaged from a remote forest in Belize is the world’s most coveted tonewood

In a city where diplomats and embassies abound, where interpreters can command six-figure salaries, where language proficiency is résumé rocket fuel, Vaughn Smith was a savant with a secret.

Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are part of what makes our species special.

How the impeccably credentialed, improbably charming economic historian supplanted the dirtbag left.

Suddenly, a New York cop remembered a long-ago double murder.

A strong national identity is essential for any country's survival – and the easiest route to acquiring one is to unite behind a common enemy.

On the value of unconscious association, or why the best advice is no advice.

This article is taken from the March 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10. If you’ve ever wondered how letters were…

The new owner of Argentina’s de facto national treat stopped paying his majority-female workforce — so they seized control of the entire operation.

In the midst of the 2018 Ferguson Fire in Northern California, a young bulldozer driver tumbled to his death trying to cut a fire break to protect his friends and his neighbors. Despite flames and dangerous terrain, his fellow firefighters were determined to do whatever it took to recover his body.

The first successful transplantation may solve a donor shortage, but this major scientific advancement is not without challenges.

How adoptable animals became a cultural phenomenon in their own right, and a key part of a transformation of companion-animal welfare.

A family feud over drugs, money and fried fish roils the heart of the Texas prison system.

Oysters may survive population decline in Apalachicola, Florida, but what about the people who harvest them?

The musicians were diabolically bad as people, and satanically good as performers.

In 1944, the USS Johnston sank after a battle against the world's largest battleship. More than 75 years later, her wreck was finally located, 6km (3.7 miles) below the waves.

It was the deadliest U.S. transportation disaster in a decade. The man behind it was one of the most notorious confidential informants in FBI history.

The Divine Comedy is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Did the iconic three-note sequence come from Stravinsky, the Muppets or somewhere else? Our writer set out to – dun, dun duuuun! – reveal the mystery

In 1708, the Spanish galleon San José sank in a deadly battle against English warships, taking with it billions in treasure. Centuries passed until a secretive archaeologist found the wreck, but now nations are again warring over who may claim the gold and glory.

The stretch of coastline in southwest Africa is a strange and beautiful reminder that, in the end, we are powerless against nature and time.

The long read: In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to make his daughter a princess. But Jack Shenker had got there first – and learned that states and borders are volatile and delicate things

Unputdownable books you can finish in bed tonight.

In the 20th century, Japanese anthropologists and officials tried to hide the existence of the Indigenous Ainu. Then the Ainu fought back like their cousins, the bears.

For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear?

Julia Child's collaborator Simone Beck has lingered as an object of pity in public memory. But maybe Beck didn’t want stardom at all.

Biscuit-whisperer Erika Council honors the women who taught her to bake a perfect biscuit.

The year's most exciting discoveries include a Viking "piggy bank," a lost Native American settlement and a secret passageway hidden behind a bookshelf

Madden, who died Tuesday at the age of 85, made a generation of football fans smarter

The political, moral, and visceral considerations behind assassination.

The Biden Administration faces a potential confrontation with a longtime rival that is better armed and more hard-line than at any time in its modern history.

The fig is an ecological marvel. Although you may never want to eat one again.

Beekeeping helped Gary Adkison pull his life together. Now he's among the tenacious harvesters of tupelo honey.

The beloved Christmas short story may have been dashed off on deadline but its core message has endured

Mandy Matney kept a harsh spotlight trained on South Carolina’s Murdaugh family until they became impossible for anyone to ignore

Helium is a critical—and finite—resource. The future of our most indispensable technologies depends on a new supply.

For a long time, I thought MSG was a food additive more like "Red 40", that it had some obscure food-science use and junk food companies were either too lazy or callous to replace it. It turns out it's more like salt. Good luck taking that out of your Cheetos.

My Unsung Hero · Episode

For our reporter, “Nightmare Alley” recalls a childhood spent working the circuit with his parents. Carnies like the World’s Smallest Woman welcomed him when cruel classmates didn’t.

Due in large part to Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, a Georgia optometrist, and several members of what's known as the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation (yes, that exists), Carolina Gold rice is back, allowing a new generation of home cooks to experience what real Lowcountry cooking was meant to taste like.

Hulu’s “The Great” offers an irreverent, ahistorical take on the Russian empress’ life. This is the real history behind the period comedy.

On a remote island in Maine, a group of friends thought they witnessed one man killing another with an ax. But no one was ever arrested. In a small town far out at sea, justice sometimes works a little differently.

The painstaking process of picking piñon makes for a booming roadside economy for the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous Americans

When a 1920s aviation pioneer launched a thank-you project for the families that keep coastal ships safe, he propelled a tradition that’s lasted longer than he ever imagined.

Oil-field medics face long hours, grisly accidents, desolation, and low pay. So why do they do it?

The booming market for certain vintage vehicles is driven by a particular vision of authenticity.

For five years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? A trap? Or a complete waste of time?

Josephine Baker next week will become the first Black woman and first American to be honored with enshrinement in Paris' Pantheon.

You might consider them flying rats, but their odysseys stump scientists

The quest to decode hieroglyphic writing.

In the mid-sixties, Candace Mossler was one of the most widely known socialites in Houston. She was in her forties, vivacious and full of charm, with wavy blond hair, deep-blue eyes, and a surgically enhanced figure that was often remarked upon in the many newspaper columns written about her.

In 2019, Charles Conwell unintentionally ended Patrick Day’s life with his fists. Now he’s trying to make sense of his life, and boxing itself.

Margaret Talbot’s 2007 Profile of the show’s creator, with a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of “The Wire” ’s fifth season.

After decades of dominance, Tommy Caldwell is still seeking new ascents.

It is deadly, invisible and shapes much of the food we eat. A teaspoon of it could kill millions of people, and it is probably the most expensive material on earth. Yet you probably have some stuck to the bottom of you shoe.

Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit

From 1999: “There has certainly never been anything like it on TV, and on network TV there never could be anything like it.”

Solving the mysteries of scent

He brought Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Cabbage Patch Kids to our living rooms. He made and lost fortunes. Can Al Kahn stay in the game?

The long read: An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past

He’s the greatest marathoner in history, a national hero in Kenya, and an icon for runners around the world. But despite his fame and wealth, Eliud Kipchoge chooses to live the most basic lifestyle. Cathal Dennehy travels to the highlands of Kenya for an inside look at his training camp and to meet a champion with a quiet, complex personality

After a chunk of his brain was removed, guitarist Pat Martino got his groove back.

58 musicians showed up for a picture that captured the giants of jazz

Nenad Georgievski writes at All About Jazz, though the world knew little about Malian music until American musicians began partnering with players from West Africa. In the 1980s, Stevie Wonder began touring with Amadou and Mariam, helping to popularize their form of Malian blues.

A lifetime of brutal injuries and misfortune robbed the world-renowned pianist João Carlos Martins of the ability to play his instrument. And then along came an eccentric designer and his bionic gloves.

From the docks of 12th-century Genoa to the gambling tables of today, risk is a story that we tell ourselves about the future

The heart of the world’s oldest long poem is found in its gaps and mysteries.

It flurried all day Sunday in Vermont. Ekiben co-founder Steve Chu watched the flakes with dread. Snow in the fryer would be trouble. This is the story of how the owners of Baltimore’s most p…

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.

Does your internal monologue play out on a television, in an attic, as a bickering Italian couple – or is it entirely, blissfully silent?

Despite the evidence supporting prescribed fires in the American West, policymakers are slow to put it into practice.

Growers of New Mexico’s iconic crop wrestle with drought, water rights and labor shortages.

A whistleblower puts his life on the line to defy Soviet aggression. Over sixty years later, this forgotten story of subterfuge, smears and suspicious death has never felt more timely.

The North Texas teenager went missing in the late eighties. For years, no one knew where she was, or even if she was still alive-no one, that is, except a mysterious young woman two thousand miles away.

Stranded in Yemen’s war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If—or when—it explodes or sinks, thousands may die.

For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?

James A. Garfield High School in Seattle is a place where you can feel the history thrum throughout the hallways. Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix were students here. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke …

Heinrich Himmler sent a team of five Germans to Tibet in 1938 to pursue the Aryan race myth.

What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

The long read: Around the turn of the millennium, hedge fund investors put an audacious bet on coal mining in the US. The bet failed – but it was the workers and the environment that paid the price

Living on a remote oil platform 60 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico is no easy assignment. Now imagine being one of the first women to ever step on board.

Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police

On this ward at Morton Plant Hospital, nurses are overwhelmed by the number of new, desperate cases.

Last year in Nova Scotia, after 3-year-old Dylan Ehler vanished, online sleuths descended on Facebook groups to help find him. Then they lost their way.

The long read: Last year, three cryptocurrency enthusiasts bought a cruise ship. They named it the Satoshi, and dreamed of starting a floating libertarian utopia. It didn’t work out

It was the most shocking crime of its day, 27 boys from the same part of town kidnapped, tortured, and killed by an affable neighbor named Dean Corll. Forty years later, it remains one of the least understood—or talked about—chapters in Houston's history.

With his stubborn disregard for the hierarchy of wines, Robert Parker, the straight-talking American wine critic, is revolutionizing the industry -- and teaching the French wine establishment some lessons it would rather not learn.

Discovered more than a decade ago, a remarkable compound shows promise in treating everything from Alzheimer’s to brain injuries—and it just might improve your cognitive abilities.

A man is presumed murdered. In this town of 12, everyone is a possible suspect.

The inside story of a black sheep hedge fund, a massive bet that shopping malls would crash, and how they proved Wall Street wrong.

From the depths of poverty, Du Yuesheng rose through Shanghai’s underworld to become one of the most influential, and overlooked, figures in modern China.

One patient in a pioneering trial describes his “life-changing” experience with the psychoactive drug.

How the writer Jesse Armstrong keeps the billionaire Roy family trapped in its gilded cage.

After years apart, the Black Crowes perform at the Forum on Thursday, part of a tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of the group’s breakthrough debut.

While big-name chefs take up Appalachian cooking, a farm couple are using old seeds and recipes to tell a more complex story and lift up their region.

In 2002, Kobe Bryant's surprise arrival at Harlem's legendary court caused a stir. This is the oral history of what happened when the Lakers great put his streetball cred on the line.

Why does a genre obsessed with death attract the kindest people?

‘He was just out there drilling long threes in his shades and hitting cutters. It was really incredible.’

Best books on assassinations, recommended by historian Michael Burleigh, covering everything from Caesar to JFK, to drone warfare.

Scientists discovered a previously unidentified genetic mutation in a Scottish woman. They hope it could lead to the development of new pain treatment.

From ancient Egypt to the Persian Empire, an ingenious method of catching the breeze kept people cool for millennia. Now, it could come to our aid once again.

Fifty years ago, a shooting that nearly killed police officer Daril Cinquanta set in motion a decadeslong chase across the American West

The world’s most obsessive breakfast-food fans demonstrate just how far humans will go for the sweet taste of nostalgia.

Dozens of “rare Cheetos,” shaped like everything from Donald Trump to a squirrel, are up for sale on eBay. But who’s buying?

Things got weird when a 19-year-old artist shared her unique hobby online.

Collectors swapped ads featuring pretty pictures, demons, and chefs bursting out of giant pickles.

Their collections may look like trash to you, but these guys know every can has a story—and some have shockingly high price tags, too.

Most of us try to avoid radiation, but not Andrew Walker, who collects radioactive objects. The surprising part? These items can be found in a variety of common places.

When there’s a murder or mysterious death in remote areas of Alaska, corpses are flown in to the state morgue. This is what it’s like to run that airborne operation.

Gabe Bullard takes a long, hard look at the history of hillbilly TV, from Andy Griffith to “Duck Dynasty.”

Fiction, from 1948: “The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around.”

A new federal facility in Kansas will house the deadliest agricultural pathogens in the world—and researchers working tirelessly to contain them.

Homo sapiens has a throwing arm that sets it apart. Athletes are helping anthropologists understand this prowess.

Conservationists saw the 6-year-old brown bear as a symbol of hope. Villagers saw him as a menace. Then he turned up dead.

The true star of the Akutagawa Prize-winning novel Convenience Store Woman is the convenience store itself. But what is it that makes these shops so magical?

Your obnoxious neighbor or just a misunderstood, displaced seabird?

Dozens of people were killed, died by suicide, or went missing from the Texas military base last year alone. What is behind the violence and tragedy at Fort Hood?

Behind the American Museum of Natural History’s most venerable artifact is the shameful tale of a relentless explorer and a young boy’s torturous journey from Greenland to New York.

A study digs up the origin of the single species that gives us turnips, bok choy, broccoli rabe, and more.

How a goofy, God-fearing airport worker stole a passenger plane from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport and took flight with no plan to land.

In 2016 North Korean hackers planned a $1bn raid on Bangladesh's national bank and came within an inch of success. But how did they do it?

Evgenia Arbugaeva’s pictures of isolated figures in harsh terrain look recovered from the deep past or icebound legend.

What deep brain stimulation surgery feels like.

European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong

How do we understand Blue in the 21st century? Can we think of Mitchell's 1971 album, long considered the apex of confessional songwriting, as a paradigm not of raw emotion, but of care and craft?

When a Russian scientist identified the Malus sieversii as the progenitor of the domestic apple, harvests in Kazakhstan’s forests were bountiful; now this wild fruit is threatened.

Zito Madu in pursuit of London’s wildlife.

No one could deny that Timothy was sick. But when doctors can’t agree on the cause of an illness, what happens to the patients trapped in limbo?

A yearlong campaign to hold major companies accountable for online sexual abuse met with little success — until a New York Times article got a hedge fund manager involved.

The young woman who mysteriously drowned in the Ropers Motel pool in 1966 might have remained anonymous forever, if not for cutting-edge genetics, old-fashioned genealogy—and the kindness of a small West Texas town.

The accelerating effort to understand the mathematics of quantum field theory will have profound consequences for both math and physics.

For decades, Taiwan’s minority Hakka people were banned from teaching their native language. Now an unlikely coalition of aging academics and millennial radio DJs are doing all they can to keep it alive.

West Berlin's lifeline during the Soviet Blockade, Tempelhof Airport has since become the city’s biggest park. Berliners will fight to keep it that way.

The long read: Dumba has spent her life performing in circuses around Europe, but in recent years animal rights activists have been campaigning to rescue her. When it looked like they might succeed, Dumba and her owners disappeared

Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent book reveals that medicine remains as much an art as a science

In 1721, London was in the grips of a deadly smallpox epidemic. One woman learned how to stop it, but her solution sowed political division.

Tom Brown's retirement hobby is a godsend for chefs, conservationists, and cider.

Dubbed the Ravens, misfit American pilots in Vietnam learned they could fly, fight, and drink as they pleased in a CIA-sponsored secret war. Just one catch: They answered to General Vang Pao.

Discover extraordinary true stories celebrating the diversity of humanity. Click to read Narratively, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.

Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

This is the previously classified story of a Hail Mary plan, a Dirty Dozen crew of lowlifes, and a woman who wouldn’t bow to authority as she fought to bring three captured CIA agents home from Cuba.

For elderly Americans, social isolation is especially perilous. Will machine companions fill the void?

When a private-equity firm bought a Philadelphia institution, the most vulnerable patients bore the cost.

Thirty years ago, Billboard changed the way it tabulated its charts, turning the industry on its head and making room for genres once considered afterthoughts to explode in the national consciousness

On the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts took it all too far. Neither man was ever the same.

A man returns home from the army and gets a surprising offer from his father: Join the family business and help mom & pop pull off a string of daring cross-country heists. No one expects the betrayals coming.

This week the police disinterred a body, found on a beach in 1948, that has puzzled investigators for decades. “There’s lots of twists and turns in this case, and every turn is pretty weird,” one said.

Thousands of soldiers, civilians and contractors operate under false names, on the ground and in cyberspace. A Newsweek investigation of the ever-growing and unregulated world of "signature reduction."

Paper, books, wooden joints, tea whisks — Japanese culture has, for seemingly all of its long recorded history, greatly esteemed the making of objects.

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.

More than two decades after his mother died, Jay Steele unearthed a Tupperware full of his mother’s Kodak photo slides. Her photos revealed a world of mud-stomping, banjo-strumming, red-clay-wandering joy, a world he never knew about until he cracked the lid of her old box.

What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture?

In swinging 1940s Hawaii, an eager young sailor courts a trailblazing woman who dreams of joining the Navy herself. The attack on Pearl Harbor upends their lives and solidifies a romance that lasts sixty-seven years.

How did Ruja Ignatova make $4bn selling her fake cryptocurrency to the world - and where did she go?

Doesn’t look like much, does it? But, depending upon your definition, this photograph, a team effort by 9 men, is the most honored picture in U. S.

The mission, still a secret to this day, was so dangerous many men bid emotional goodbyes...

Fifty years after their first release, the country-rock titans led by Don Henley and the late Glenn Frey still loom large in American music. Their hits still get play and their sound is a precursor to modern Nashville. But has this biggest of bands aged well? A panel of experts weigh the case.

When nearly $3.5M of rare books were stolen in an audacious heist at Feltham in 2017, police wondered, what’s the story?

Twenty years after it aired, David Chase and Co. look back on one of the wildest, boldest, funniest episodes of ‘The Sopranos’ ever made

The day the fire came to the Franklin Ranch.

The plan to kill Osama bin Laden—from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop—as told by the people in the room.

Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight

Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their liver. What else might be possible?

While captive in a Navy program, a beluga whale named Noc began to mimic human speech. What was behind his attempt to talk to us?

In the first look at one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated books, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, the author describes a terrifying tragedy that foreshadowed the horrors awaiting a group of turn-of-the-century explorers in uncharted Antarctica.

A true story of castaways on a lost and hostile scrap of land, all thanks to some meddlesome Frenchmen and terrible luck.

In gritty 1980s New York, one West Village flophouse became a last-chance refuge for addicts, criminals, LGBTQ runaways, and anyone with nowhere left to go. And my mom was their queen.

It doesn't have the nicest coral formations nor the most fish. But the Blue Hole in the Gulf of Aqaba is a magnet for divers, primarily because of its reputation. Dozens of adventurers have lost their lives here over the years and, when they do, Tarek Omar pulls them back to the surface.

Just before Alex Godfrey’s grandmother died from dementia, she snapped back to lucidity and regaled him with stories of her youth. Could moments like this teach us more about the human brain?

Artificial intelligence may help us decode animalese. But how much will we really be able to understand?

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.

Cameron Ortis was an RCMP officer privy to the inner workings of Canada's national security—and in a prime position to exploit them

From unappetizing “fishbricks” to cultural darlings, the 1950s convenience food has enjoyed a winning streak—no less so than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sewage epidemiology has been embraced in other countries for decades, but not in the U.S. Will Covid change that?

In 1970, an image of a dead protester at Kent State became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?

Five years after his death, let's remember one of the most unique talents ever to be drawn to the game

Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.

Millions suffered through terror and upheaval in the turbulent years following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. One of them was a baby elephant from India — A new story from India to the world, each week on FiftyTwo.in

The descendants of pets abandoned by those fleeing the Chernobyl disaster are now striking up a curious relationship with humans charged with guarding the contaminated area.

The microscopic animals can withstand extreme conditions that would kill humans, and may one day help in the development of Covid vaccines. How do they do it?

The Penobscot language was spoken by almost no one when Frank Siebert set about trying to preserve it. The people of Indian Island are still reckoning with his legacy.

Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon.

On the original show, which is now streaming for the first time on Disney+, bits of fabric and glue and yarn become complexly real.

As a reptile-obsessed teen, I ran away to hunt lizards in the Everglades, then hatched a plan to milk venom from deadly snakes. It went even more comically wrong than you're thinking.

In 1974, John Patterson was abducted by the People’s Liberation Army of Mexico—a group no one had heard of before. The kidnappers wanted $500,000, and insisted that Patterson’s wife deliver the ransom.

The long read: In 2019, the body of a man fell from a passenger plane into a garden in south London. Who was he?

The hills are alive with socially distant adventures.

Up, up, and away!

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also

Birds do it. Bees do it. Learning about the astounding navigational feats of wild creatures can teach us a lot about where we’re going.

He was a powerful executive at some of the best-known companies in the world. Then he started robbing banks. The meteoric rise and…

A daring teenage girl defies authority to become Morocco’s first female pilot and the hero of a young nation—then the victim of an assassination still shrouded in mystery.

What’s a year of social distancing when you’re a one-human town?

Valdosta might be a 24-time state football champ, but lately its program has been rocked by a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by a former coach, the hiring of controversial coach Rush Propst and a secret recording that alleged cheating by SEC powers.

The publication of the “Harper’s letter” attracted huge attention. Most people had stopped reading the magazine, which is stranger and better than you might expect.

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?

What does a crew of talented musicians do when forced to serve at the pleasure of a notoriously cruel dictator? They play like their lives depend on it.

Scholar Monica Green combined the science of genetics with the study of old texts to reach a new hypothesis about the plague

Ricardo Sapienza served 25 years for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. But his hardest challenge began the day the parole board finally said “yes.”

Noor Khan, a pacifist descendant of Indian Royalty became a famed World War II spy for Britain’s Special Operations Executive.

In 1978 he was music’s next big thing. Then his album bombed, he began a long slide into obscurity, and a bizarre fraud sent him to prison. Will Dane Donohue finally get his encore?

A bartender opens up about what it’s really like to spend your nights as a therapist/wingman/entertainer/best friend for an entire roomful of inebriated New Yorkers.

The zoologist Arik Kershenbaum argues that because some evolutionary challenges are truly universal, life throughout the cosmos may share certain features.

He earned a fortune at Goldman Sachs, but now the banker wants the financial sector to reassess its values and tackle the climate emergency

Nearly 200 years ago, Dhaka muslin was the most valuable fabric on the planet. Then it was lost altogether. How did this happen? And can we bring it back?

Nearly a century after the last wolf was eradicated in the state, a lone female arrived and established a pack. Not everyone is cheering

After a turbulent decade, the Gary, Indiana, native has cemented himself as one of the greatest rappers of his—or any—generation. And on Sunday, he’s up for a Grammy award.

Western museums are under pressure to return looted treasure, but what of those in private collections?

Indiana is set to host a Big Dance unlike any other, evoking the madness—from buzzer beaters to bourbon-soaked basketball—of the state's fabled high school tournament.

In her quest to master a quintessential cool-kid trick, Outside contributor Kim Cross found the sweet spot at the crossroads of work and play

Skipjack are the world’s most abundant tuna. They’re resilient, but can they outswim our demand for this pantry staple?

He wanted to become a serious literary novelist, like Faulkner or Hemingway. Fortunately for millions of Hank the Cowdog fans, he failed.

The vaudeville dancer and his beguiling Parisian wife arrived in Manhattan in 1911 with secret identities in tow. They enjoyed wealth and notoriety for years—until it all came crashing down.

The Official Site of Major League Baseball

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen grew up to make New York’s most desirable clothes. But can even perfection survive the pandemic?

Millions of hearts fail each year. Why can’t we replace them?

What are the greatest art heists of all time? See a list of the 25 most memorable thefts from museums.

America’s bold response to the Soviet Union depended on an unknown spy agency operative whose story can at last be told

We are now past the mid-way point in February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that …

The author, a former soldier, reflects on his experiences helping build the top secret Karakoram Highway between China and Pakistan in the late 1970s.

‘It’s a trip just being out’: at the local Greyhound bus station with newly released men from the Texas State Penitentiary

Kidnapped at 9 by Joseph Kony’s notorious guerilla army, Dominic Ongwen was groomed to kill. Is he a lost soul deserving of mercy, or a cold-blooded war criminal who must face justice?

For all of its other moving parts, ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ relies on teasing out the part of a hustle that I am most fascinated by in real life.

Iga Swiatek of Poland came out of nowhere to win the French Open in October. A sports psychologist was with her all the way.

After Kenya declared independence from British rule in 1963, there came a flood of renamings. Schools, suburbs, and roads were rechristened in ways that spoke to a new idea of what it meant to be…

Last summer a monster storm tore across Iowa, leaving billions of dollars damage in its wake. It was a brutal blow to an economy already reeling from a deadly pandemic and a state divided by politics like never before.

The Pacific Crest Trail is as dangerous as it is beautiful. This is the story of one young hiker who never made it home.

The narrative wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with.

These are the things that have inspired me the most or changed the way I live. You can find what I'm reading now on Goodreads [https://goodreads.com/austenallred]. Memos/Articles/Blogs * Amazon Shareholder Letters [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SpgDsIpC_cAS0O4cBz4Sb_GJcEIBhUtA/view?usp=sharing] * Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder

The photographer Debsuddha documents the indignities suffered by his albino aunts in Kolkata, and how their world became even smaller in coronavirus lockdown.

After hiding just out of frame for decades, an exceptionally rare and remarkable Depression-era neon sign was discovered outside of Los Angeles. Then the past came rushing back.

A comprehensive list of logical fallacies, with definitions, explanations, and examples that are easy-to-understand.

The Armenian alphabet is a true masterpiece of its era and knows many secrets. However, there is one in particular that still blows my mind. As some people know the Armenian alphabet was (re)invented in 405 AD by the Armenian linguist and theologian Mesrop Mashtots with the help of the patriarch Sahak Partev and the […]

Marie Kondo is just the current manifestation of a tradition of cleaning.

How a team of spies in Mexico got their hands on Russia's space secrets—and tried to change the course of the Cold War.

Dr. Donald Johnson has spent his career making crime scene blood stains spill their secrets. His next mission: bringing forensic science into the iPad age.

As CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub made the biggest deal the oil business had seen in years. Will it also go down as the biggest failure?

I travelled the world and trawled the archive to unearth the hidden lessons from history’s most brilliant people

Kitt’s 1989 autobiography, “Confessions of a Sex Kitten,” tracks an icon’s incredible journey from abused child to outspoken star.

The company’s software can sift through enormous amounts of data, and those metrics can be used to make life-or-death decisions.

The hard life and overlooked brilliance of Zane Campbell.

For the first time since the passing of Rush's drum god, Neil Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson speak about his legacy.

In Sept. 9, 1975, William Osterhoudt, a local school principal, looked out at an implausible scene unfolding at the pink house belonging to his neighbor on United Street. Key West Fire Chief Joseph…

We asked three executives who’ve spent their careers on the cutting edge of the financial industry what they see coming in 5 to 10 years. Here are their answers.

Ed O’Neill made his career during the era when networks dominated TV, starring in “Married... With Children” and “Modern Family.” He also gives a stunning performance in the recently released film “The Last Shift,” a new comedy about working-class life. He opens up to Wealthsimple about earning $300 a week in a steel mill in Youngstown and getting a $3-million bonus in Hollywood.

The rescue in July of two children from a burning apartment in Grenoble, southern France, captivated the world. For the first time six of the seven men injured in the rescue explain what happened in those critical moments.

Although ‘Cheers’ made the actor a star, he always swore he had a tough time getting comfortable playing the womanizing character. But the humanity he brought to Sam has informed his career and his life ever since.

In Alaska, one of the longest-running and most comprehensive seabird monitoring projects is equal parts tedium, adventure, truth, and beauty.

Debunking the myth that the great national park was a wilderness untouched by humans

What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?

He wanted to learn about the Miami drug world and had been told I could help.

Where culinary bliss meets environmental peril, and how to solve America’s poke problem.

How a group of nonresident homeowners tried to influence a rural Colorado election.

Drought, dread and family in the American Southwest.

Plano surgeon Christopher Duntsch left a trail of bodies. The shocking story of a madman with a scalpel.

Oh, you hit the fire road again with your lifted Wrangler? Cute.

I mean, the idea that you would give a psychedelic—in this case, magic mushrooms or the chemical called psilocybin that's derived from magic mushrooms—to people dying of cancer, people with terminal diagnoses, to help them deal with their - what's called existential distress.

The giant squid has taken on a near-mythical status for generations of sailors, explorers, and writers. How could something so big remain unseen—or be less understood than dinosaurs?

It’s dangerous to blame the decline of one species on a single predator. We humans like to do it anyway.

What the hole is going on?

The mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy.

The skills behind the legendary sharpness of wootz steel were once forgotten, but Andy Extance talks to the researchers unsheathing its secrets

How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.

How a booming oil town aimed to become a western metropolis through one of the most ill-conceived boxing matches of all time.

Sonoma County’s SingleThread has been hailed as the apotheosis of high-end, farm-to-table dining. The perpetual threat of wildfires and once-in-a-generation flooding also make it a case study in the challenges that climate change will soon pose to restaurants everywhere.

Generations of musicians got their start busking the streets of the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. After a decade of 'hobo-ing' around cities like New Orleans, Paris, and New York, Charley Crockett discovered it was his turn.

When Mark Olmsted contracted HIV, in the early 1980s, he figured the disease was a death sentence. And so he hatched a scheme to live out his last years in style—swiping credit cards, bilking insurance companies, even faking his own death. What’s the problem with some forgery, fraud, and crystal meth if you’ll soon be gone? A better question might have been: What the hell happens if you survive?

A family in Bangladesh struggles with an extremely rare genetic condition, "immigration delay disease".

Mistletoes have all but shut down the powerhouses of their cells. Scientists are still trying to understand the plants’ unorthodox survival strategy.

The state loses a football field’s worth of land every hour and a half. Now engineers are in a race to prevent it from sinking into oblivion.

Cancer surgery for $700, a heart bypass for $2,000. Pretty good, but under India’s new health-care system, it’s not good enough.

John Franzese Jr. helped send his father, notorious Colombo family mobster Sonny Franzese, to prison. Then he turned up in Indianapolis.

How a big crime in a small town produced a whodunit as gripping and colorful as “The Wizard of Oz” itself.

The story of a migrant spy

For years, the clients of a Colorado funeral home kept their loved ones’ cremated remains. Then the FBI called.

The boutique fitness phenomenon sold exclusivity with a smile, until a toxic atmosphere and a push for growth brought the whole thing down.

Featuring paradoxical black holes, room-temperature superconductors and a new escape from the prison of time.

For decades, Jim Woodward dreamed of a propellantless engine to take humans to the stars. Now he thinks he’s got it. But is it revolutionary—or illusory?

With roots dating back to the 13th century, Grýla is not to be messed with.

A 4-year-old girl coping with the loneliness of the pandemic created a tiny garden, and kindled an unlikely friendship with an enchanted neighbor who moved into her tree.

A walk on the weird side of history

Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there.

Bellingcat and its partners reported that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) was implicated in the near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning of Alexey Navalny on 20 August 2020. The report identified eight clandestine operatives with medical and chemical/biological warfare expertise working under the guise of the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute who had tailed Alexey Navalny on more than 30 […]

"I don’t need a pair of Nikes. I need a 401(k)" -- and other lessons from the death of a venture-backed, Facebook-dependent, millennial-focused news site.

More than 17 years ago, a successful Michigan attorney took his life on a cherished trout stream, devastating close friends and family. Haunted by what happened, his nephew investigated and discovered tragic truths that were in plain sight all along.

A humble Scotsman saw something strange in the water—and daringly set out to catch it—only to have lecherous out-of-towners steal his fame and upend his quest.

Workers used a chain to cut off the first enormous chunk of ship, revealing mangled cars within. Here’s a look at the fascinating way the team pulled this off.

The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.

Burkhard Bilger’s 2005 piece on the short-order cooks at the Flamingo hotel, who crack well over a million eggs a year, in a city built by breakfast specials.

In burying a stranger, a writer learns that dying can be as small and personal as life.

Take a trip to the uncanny valley and hope you make it back unscathed.

We’ve mapped Mars, the Moon, the solar system, even our own galaxy. Which means there is only one thing left to understand in this symbolic way and that is the entirety of the cosmos.

This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn’t resemble an organic heart—and might be all the better for it.

On Syd Barrett's time with Pink Floyd and making an album with household objects and found sounds.

When Umberto Eco, the semiologist, medievalist, and author of the best-selling medieval puzzle-novel The Name of the Rose, lectured at Yale to celebrate the Beinecke Library’s fiftieth anniversary, the only one of its many treasures he asked to see was the Voynich manuscript.

Working with them in the wilderness means negotiating countless shifting variables. Sounds a lot like the world we’re living in.

The F.B.I. tried to recruit an Iranian scientist as an informant. When he balked, the payback was brutal.

The Broomway is known as the most perilous path in Britain – and is a favourite walk of writer Robert Macfarlane, who describes it in this adaptation from his book The Old Ways.

Theodore Robert Wright III carried out one of the boldest insurance fraud schemes Texas has ever seen. That was only the half of it.

Kansas City Chiefs running backs coach Deland McCullough went searching for his biological parents. He found them where he never would have expected.

One cunning business maneuver created a tradition and saved a franchise.

Both I and my research have been deeply affected by a polar bear I have never met face to face.

“It was the most fragile object we have ever encountered.”

Step right up!

After decades of conflict in North Kosovo, all it’s taken for Serb and Albanian politicians to put aside their resentments is the get-rich-quick prospect of cryptomining.

The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by

How a sacred object from the Pueblo of Acoma turned up at a Paris auction house, and how the tribe fought for its return.

Production for The General involved guns, bombs, fires, and the blowing up of a bridge in a tiny Oregon town.

A college student’s lost-and-then-found wallet leads to a theatrical treasure hunt complete with hollowed-out library books, a disappearing magician, and an unforgettable year of campy one-upmanship.

Although the sound of the music has changed, country’s themes have endured.

Along the murky border of China and Myanmar is a no-man’s-land where prostitution is unchecked, gambling is rampant, and the tiger bone wine flows freely.

If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication?

In this remote Swiss town, residents spent a lifetime aging a wheel for their own funeral.

When the auto king fled house arrest, he captivated the world. Now, the guy who helped him is in jail—and never got paid a dime.

Dongtuk’s home town was known for self-immolations. How would he choose to live?

These people drove from the U.K. to Siberia—and you can, too.

Earlier this month, CBS fired Peter Lenkov, who’d overseen a powerful fiefdom. V.F. spoke to 30 sources about what happens when a network gives somebody a difficult job, then seems to let problems pile up for years because he’s making it money.

Residents of Celles in France were evicted so their village could be flooded. Then, it wasn’t.

The search for Syrian war criminals in Europe

Pathogens that switch to a new host species have some adapting to do. How does that affect the course of a pandemic like Covid-19?

Fourteen animals near Mount Lassen are the best hope for the reestablishment of this misunderstood species.

Dick Proenneke has achieved something mythical: he seems happy.

Bored with baseball cards and baubles, Jason Liebig turned to collecting vintage candy wrappers—and his Astoria apartment now houses some 10,000 of them.

Claudia Dreifus: You are sometimes called “the Balzac of Baltimore.” What’s your take on the title? David Simon: When people say that, I go, “Did you just call me a ball sac?” I usually goof on that. I haven’t read all of Balzac. I keep slicing up society, taking a different slice each time, thinking, eventually I’ll have a cake. That’s Balzac. That’s what he did. What I never do is raise my hand and say, “This could be a hit. Make this because this could be a hit.” The minute I do that, I’m done as me.

The story of Tupperware™ is one of innovation and reinvention: a new kind of plastic, made from industrial waste, became a symbol of female empowerment.

Researchers have found fish that absorb more than 99.9 percent of the light that hits their skin.

When an Italian patriarch crosses the Atlantic, the family he left behind clings tight to the enticing promise of New York.

In the era of online dating, one septuagenarian Irishman clings tight to a method passed down through the generations—and thousands of happy couples are luckier for it.

How a pandemic unfolds when you’re a Wall Street billionaire.

In swinging 1940s Hawaii, an eager young sailor courts a trailblazing woman who dreams of joining the Navy herself. The attack on Pearl Harbor upends their lives and solidifies a romance that lasts 67 years.

The human-smuggling route across the Sahara may have been the deadliest on Earth. Then the EU paid off Niger’s army to shut it down — and made it even more treacherous.

“It’s a really neat feeling to help people be able to print from hot metal.”

They call themselves the "fearless ones." They've built a reputation not just for their martial arts prowess but for teaching girls to stand up for their rights. And they love watching horror movies.

For centuries, the United States and Canada’s only remaining land border dispute has been kept alive by a single family.

Murder will happen in outer space. This 50-year-old death on a now-melted chunk of ice shows how complicated it will get.

From the English Channel to the Pacific, one band of volunteer divers look for the remains of American M.I.A.s. I joined and discovered this mission can be perilous — even deadly.

How Michael Render—a rapper from Atlanta who also happens to be a Second Amendment–loving, Bernie Sanders–boosting, unapologetically pro-Black businessman—became one of the loudest and most original political voices in the country.

“We are starved! We are starved!” the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown cried out in desperation as two ships arrived with provisions in June 1610. They suffered from exhaustion, starvation, and malnutrition as well as from a strange sickness that “caused all our skinns to peele off, from head to foote, as if we had beene flayed.” During those pitiless months of “starving time” they turned to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, venomous snakes, and other famine foods: mushrooms, toadstools, “or what els we founde growing upon the grounde that would fill either mouth or belly.”

A cash-strapped rancher, a virus-stricken meatpacker, an underpaid chef, a hungry engineer: All their lives have been upended

Humpbacks are some of the most watched whales in the world, and yet so much of their lives remains a mystery.

Astrology, private equity, a $1.1 billion gender discrimination lawsuit, and a precariously built bangle behemoth

Don’t blame JFK

The farm-to-table frenzy has thousands of urbanites trading in their desks for the idylls of agriculture. But one eager young couple learns the hard way that organic utopia is easier dreamed than achieved.

The Yes keyboardist defined Spinal Tap–esque excess, until he staked everything on his eccentric dream of an Arthurian rock opera on ice. Now, the tale of his epic spiral and long, slow comeback can finally be told.

He was a Lower East Side gangster, wartime chemical researcher and secretive color television pioneer. An inquisitive daughter wants the full story, but he would rather drink his coffee and read his book in peace.

40 years ago, a U.S. satellite detected the telltale signs of a nuclear explosion. An analysis of the evidence today points to a clandestine nuclear test, a Carter administration cover-up, and only one country that was willing and able to carry it out: Israel.

We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers.

Riccardo Gazzaniga | Sometimes photographs deceive. Take this one, for example. It represents John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s rebellious gesture the day they won medals for the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in...

What happens when private firms have cyberweapons as powerful as those owned by governments?

Why it’s getting harder to stop multinational corporations.

[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…

We look back on the many chapters of Leonard Cohen's long, remarkable life, from teenage poet to midlife monk and beyond.

Translations:English (UK)Русский (Россия)On May 26th, crowds gathered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to protest the death of 46-year-old George Floyd at the hands of the city’s police department. Floyd was black. Many of the protesters were people of color.  The department fired four policemen that same day, after footage emerged appearing to show Floyd being strangled by […]

For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.

In a rare interview, Hollywood's most beloved misfit opens up about anxiety, loss, and the hard work of getting through it all.

The Tarahumara, of Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains, are the world’s greatest ultramarathoners. But in recent years, their legendary endurance has been put to a sinister use—in service of the narcos.

On the night of April 25, 1986, during a planned maintenance shutdown at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, one of the four reactors overheated and began to burn. As plant engineers scrambled to regain control of it, they thought for a moment that there had been an earthquake. In fact, a buildup of steam had propelled the two-hundred-ton concrete top of the reactor’s casing into the air, with masses of radioactive material following close behind when the core exploded. The plant workers had been assured again and again of the safety of the “peaceful atom,” and they couldn’t imagine that the reactor had exploded. Firefighters rushed to the scene without special equipment or a clear understanding of the potential risks; they had not been trained to deal with a nuclear explosion, because such training would have involved acknowledging that an explosion was possible.

For decades, Ayatollah Khamenei has professed enmity with America. Now his regime is threatened from within the country.

As one of the only inhabitants of an abandoned railway stop in eastern New Mexico, Debra Dawson has been social distancing for decades. Attracted to its history and surrounding landscape, she's found happiness far away from just about everyone.

How Single Lock Records unites the hometown legends of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, music with the new generation.

A renowned scholar claimed that he discovered a first-century gospel fragment. Now he’s facing allegations of antiquities theft, cover-up, and fraud.

UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. Here are the first five bits: Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even … Continue reading →

The industrial giant missed the shale boom, overspent on projects, and saw its debt rise to $50 billion as its stock plummeted.

The North Texas teenager went missing in the late eighties. For years, no one knew where she was, or even if she was still alive-no one, that is, except a mysterious young woman two thousand miles away.

With storefronts closed, supply chains in disarray and the global economy in peril, money laundering schemes are hobbled and cash is piling up in L.A., the city's top drug enforcement official said.

It has been a staple of kindergarten classrooms for decades. But Woody Guthrie didn’t intend for the song to be a ringing endorsement of American exceptionalism—he wrote it for those who were getting left behind.

In Jerez, a sherry maker and a criminologist have embarked on a quest to find the oldest, most potent casks of amontillado (and discover why it just makes food taste better)

The first dodecahedron was discovered nearly 300 years ago, yet no one is certain just what they were used for.

There’s nothing like getting lost in a fascinating story—and now is a better time than any to dive into another world.

Guerrilla gardener Joey Santore has planted more than 300 trees, encouraging a new appreciation of our habitat—and one another.

A young woman from Karachi doesn’t discover how intense Islam can be…until moving to Texas.

Following three Spanish Republicans from civil war to the North African campaign.

Social distancing means a net benefit of $5.2 trillion, according to the analysis.

The storied career of the centenarian and acoustician, Leo Beranek.

For a newcomer to the city, a boulangerie apprenticeship reveals a way of life.

Will Bonsall has spent a lifetime scattering seeds across the country. But will his efforts fall among the thorns?

The long read: If you feel like reading about something other than coronavirus – and filling some more time during lockdown – then dive into a few of these highlights from the long read archive

Sebastian Meyer and Kamaran Najm co-founded a photo agency in Iraq and teamed up to document a new era in Kurdistan, a region with a long history of suffering. Until Kamaran was captured by ISIS.

The Long Read: An extremely rare condition may transform our understanding of memory

The long read: Are you sitting comfortably? Many people are not – and there are some who insist the way we’ve been going to the toilet is all wrong

New advances in DNA technology — and new databases allowing law-enforcement searches — means more unsolved murder cases are being closed.

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.

French mathematician Évariste Galois lived a full life. When he wasn't trying to overthrow the government, he was reinventing algebra.

When the Discovery Channel invited me to audition for its popular survival-challenge reality show, I knew it was going to be rough. What followed was one of the most intense experiences of my life.

What will it take to find the biggest missing object in our solar system?

Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there

But maybe not for your stomach.

For a country often depicted as the pinnacle of high-tech living Japan has a surprising and enduring obsession with paper. That might finally be changing.

— Diego Lopez (@thisdiegolopez)

Harold Vilches, a 23-year-old Chilean, exported $80 million in contraband gold. It all started with a Google search.

The knobbly-skinned Japanese fruits are among the most exquisite members of the citrus family, and yuzu kosho—a fiery-hot condiment of chiles, zest, and salt—shows off all that’s wonderful about them.

In the remote archipelago of Lofoten, Arctic cod have been dried on oceanfront racks since the age of the Vikings. This is the unlikely story of how the humble fish became king of Norway

A tale of ancient philosophers, alien abductions, murder-for-hire—and how the world’s largest pearl came to be the centerpiece of an 80-year-old hoax.

If you've ever cooked a recipe from the back of one of the company's 400+ products, you have one very busy pastry chef to thank.

In the late 19th century, Richard Henry laid a blueprint for modern conservation in New Zealand.

In a world where everything is illuminated, something essential is lost.

The jazz musician’s impeccably maintained home in a modest New York City neighborhood is a testament to his — and midcentury design’s — legacy.

“N of 1” studies aim to answer medical questions one person at a time

The book Honeybee Democracy, published in 2010, has been sitting on my shelf for many years.

The Museum of Arts and Crafts is a trove of cunning inventions

Craigslist feels like an island in the slipstream, evidence of an online past where improvisation and commonality superseded hierarchy and standard practices.

Thanks to the successful “Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii!” (Kentucky for Christmas!) marketing campaign in 1974, Japan can't get enough KFC on Christmas Day

Thieves are pulling off audacious metal heists at Europe’s largest port. They’re even stealing from the Cobalt Jesus.

A renowned rare books dealer left many unanswered questions when he died, none more intriguing than the circumstances of his death.

Fresh powder beckoned 16 expert skiers and snowboarders into the backcountry. Then the snow gave way.

Development is finally coming to the top of Manhattan. Are its carwash vans doomed?

Pat Connaughton, a reserve guard for the Milwaukee Bucks, is forging his own path in basketball while continuing a family tradition of working in real estate.

Stereo images of Arrokoth (2014 MU69) are used to map its geological units and date its surface using impact craters.

In the era of online dating, one septuagenarian Irishman clings tight to a method passed down through the generations—and thousands of happy couples are luckier for it.

Colombia is on a mission to make sense of its rich biodiversity, isolated thanks to years of war. For researchers, it is a golden opportunity – and a breathtaking adventure.

Rogue waves — enigmatic giants of the sea — were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms. But a new idea that borrows from the hinterlands of probability theory has the potential to predict…

In southwest Florida, the Myakka River Valley — a place of mystery and myth — is under threat of development.

The origins of language are not what inherited disorders seemed to suggest.

For hundreds of years, there were rumors of a shipwrecked treasure on the Oregon coast. But no one found anything, until Cameron La Follette began digging.

This down-on-his-luck headbanger fabricated a persona, faked a tour and promoted himself as a hard-rock savior

Pauline Dakin's childhood in Canada in the 1970s was full of secrets, disruption and unpleasant surprises. She wasn't allowed to talk about her family life with anyone - and it wasn't until she was 23 that she was told why.

What happens when a wealthy patron wears out his welcome?

The best place to eat in Germany is in a little village in a forest.

The origin story of one of the great icons of 20th-century industrial design.

For decades, the Old Forge was the holy grail of the British outdoors community. The UK's remotest pub, it could only be reached via boat or a three-day walk through one of Britain's last true wildernesses, the Knoydart peninsula in Scotland. A dispute between some locals and a new owner threatened the legend—until they decided to open up a pub of their own.

Newnan, Ga., decided to use art to help the community celebrate diversity and embrace change. Not everyone was ready for what they saw.

When the hunting of a profitable bird is outlawed, enforcing the law means dealing with armed and angry lawbreakers.

The long read: Gene and Sandy Ralston are a married couple in their 70s, who also happen to be among North America’s leading experts at searching for the dead

For an Alaskan fishing industry with an improving safety record, the sinking of the Scandies Rose was a devastating loss. It also began an astonishing tale of endurance.

Forgeries have become so good – and so costly – that Sotheby’s has brought in its own in-house fraud-busting expert.

The mob saw an opportunity. Local 338 had other ideas.

Nine inches of rain nearly wiped Richwood, West Virginia, off the map. As waters rise around the globe, this tiny town offers a terrifying vision of our future—if we don’t act.

What started as a joke between friends has become official Simpsons lore.

A coal fortune is fueling the revival of a cuisine it nearly destroyed.

Arous was an idyllic holiday resort in the Sudanese desert, on the shores of the Red Sea. But this glamorous destination was also a base for Israeli agents with a secret mission.

Queens in many societies heavily influenced the policies and governing behavior of their kings.

Fifty years ago, a plane carrying Buddy Holly crashed in a remote Iowa cornfield. This month, hundreds of fans will gather at the ballroom where he played his final show to sing, dance, and mourn the greatest rock star ever to come out of Texas.

I wanted to be prepared for the worst nature could throw at me. But the real threat turned out to be human.

Brenda thought she and Ricky would be together forever, until he left her. Kendra thought she and Ricky would be together forever. Then Brenda took matters into her own hands. Inside the case of jealousy, spying, and murder that shook Uptown Dallas.

An armed takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca put a halt to the modernisation of Saudi society.

To be an off-season caretaker of Bodie, California (winter population: 5), you need a high tolerance for cold, solitude, and two-hour grocery runs.

How the American music legends behind 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' made millions off the work of a Zulu tribesman named Solomon Linda who died a pauper.

When her former student was found wandering the streets a decade after she’d last seen him, Michell Girard immediately agreed to take him in. Then she decided to do far more, including give him the Christmas he’d never had.

Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it's a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.

The sea of simpler songs only the drowned and the fish know to sing.

The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.

”These incidents in railroad history show most of the points where we fail ... to maintain the equities of ‘government’—and employment—‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’”

A sophisticated new electronic warfare system is being used at the world’s busiest port. But is it sand thieves or the Chinese state behind it?

The Terrewode Women’s Community Hospital is the happy ending of a story that harkens back to a time when women’s bodies were a frontier and a commodity.

Load Balancers plays a key role in Web Architecture. In this post we are going to develop a simple load balancer with power of Go

People said that women had no place in the Grand Canyon and would likely die trying to run the Colorado River. In 1938, two female scientists set out to prove them wrong.

How an internal power struggle, a New York State investigation and accusations of fraud and betrayal on all sides have left the longtime leader of the gun-rights organization reeling.

A futuristic fiction story about war, people, and robots

The work could lead to a new approach to the study of what is possible, and how it follows from what already exists.

One man's unlikely journey from servant and prisoner of war to bodybuilding champion—with an epic, trans-continental love story along the way.

In the typical emergency room, demand far outpaces the care that workers can provide. Can the E.R. be fixed?

One method, the slow, methodical work of traditional hybridization, is long familiar. The other, genetic engineering, is more controversial.

Twenty years ago, Amazon opened its storefront to anyone who wanted to sell something. Then it began demanding more out of them.

“Recalcitrant” seeds hold the secret to saving a critically endangered Indian tree—thanks to a bit of human help

A 50-inch TV for $300 comes with some trade-offs.

Despite their wacky brains, these intelligent animals seem to respond to the drug in a very similar way to humans.

To get his URL, the founder of State Snaps turned to extreme measures

The country’s new politics are often attributed to anger over migrants. But the story begins decades ago, when China first targeted small textile towns.

Two lottery-crazed clerks robbed the Agricultural Bank of China in Handan, Hebei province of over US$ 6 million

The Medallion Fund, an employees-only offering for the quants at Renaissance Technologies, is the blackest box in all of finance.

An ex-convict on how to set your mind free.

Netflix's 'The Confession Killer' examines the true story of the man who said he killed nearly 600 people.

The mother of two with an “amazing spirit” died after being sucked halfway out a window on a Southwest plane.

Yegor Zhukov’s message about responsibility and love shows what political dissent can be and seems to describe American reality as accurately as the Russian one.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year. Here is the best in crime reporting.

From Martin Luther to The Nutcracker, Germany's original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.

Daisy Dunn’s “The Shadow of Vesuvius” is a lively dual biography of the polymath Pliny the Elder and his nephew (and adopted son), Pliny the Younger.

Drawing on ancient Tibetan practices and a very human need for companionship, these people believe they have figured out how to create sentient beings within their own bodies.

An exile from French Louisiana realizes that Ed Orgeron is her very own

A phage that resists all forms of the antiviral defense known as CRISPR has an unusual means of survival.

He was beloved by Neil Gaiman and Robert Jordan, and so good that he won a World Fantasy Award for a Christmas card. How did John M. Ford disappear?

Cody Dalton Eyre, a 20-year-old Alaskan Native, was having a mental health crisis on Christmas Eve, 2017 when his mother called 911 for help. So why did police officers end up shooting and killing him?

They’re tiny and they hover, and they’re one of only three groups of birds that are vocal learners. They sing with their mouths andtheir feathers. No wonder UC Riverside researcher Chris Clark is obsessed with hummingbirds.

An Oxford grad learns to navigate boiling sugar, sleep deprivation, and exacting pastry chefs with whom she can barely communicate.

How a whole country of drivers all switched lanes at the same time.

Beverly Pennington was a Pinterest-perfect entrepreneur whose patchwork quilts—made from people’s most treasured T-shirts—found thousands of devotees all over the country. But when the quilts stopped coming, leaving the shirts in limbo, her customers pieced together a plan to fight back.

Robert Holmes taught his sons everything he knew about exposing black-market knockoffs. Now they take down the world’s biggest scammers while dodging threats from the mob.

Working summers at an authentically quaint roadside produce stand, a teenage salesperson is schooled in the not-so-subtle art of how to con a foodie from the big city.

Adam Joiner’s silver-screen dreams were finally coming true. He had a deal with Netflix, a superstar lead and even interest from Spielberg. There was only one problem: His entire story was a lie

On Saturdays Tootsie Tomanetz cooks barbecue the old-fashioned way for legions of loyal fans. That doesn’t mean she’ll ever give up her day job.

Retail giants turn to bitcoin technology to combat food-fraud that costs the global food industry up to $40 billion every year.

The ocean floor is the Earth’s last great uncharted region. Oliver Franklin-Wallis joins the man descending to the bottom of the deepest trenches on the planet

A journey to the underwater volcanoes where life may have erupted.

How did an executive in one of the league's smallest markets steal millions of dollars -- and get away with it for years?

He was the alpha male of the first pack to live in Oregon since 1947. For years, a state biologist tracked him, collared him, counted his pups, weighed him, photographed him, and protected him. But then the animal known as OR4 broke one too many rules.

Liberating ourselves by treating the world as a free place to roam.

For a core of longevity true believers, the time to intervene is now.

Japan is known for its video arcades, from the tiniest little collections of claw games in basements to entire high-rise buildings packed with floor after floor of video amusements. On Sunday, November 17, perhaps the most elaborately themed arcade in the country, Anata no Warehouse in Kawasaki, will shut down for…

Kahve was a favourite drink of the Ottoman Empire’s ruling class. Little did they know it would one day hasten the empire’s demise

Young rebels take on the unpleasant byproducts of festival culture.

What really happened to the MV Lyubov Orlova, a Russian cruise liner that was abandoned in St. John's Harbour nine years ago and eventually drifted out to sea as a rat-infested ghost ship? To find the answers, reporter Randi Beers delves into some Soviet history, the secretive world of offshore financial schemes, and the checkered histories of two men named Oleg.

My father always pampered his pets. So when he fell ill and moved in with us, it was no surprise that his corgi came to rule our home. What I didn’t expect was for Trilby to care for me after Dad was gone.

A controversial disease revives the debate about the immune system and mental illness.

Most guitars don’t have names. This one has a voice and a personality, and bears a striking resemblance to his owner.

In 2001, the internet’s premier file-sharing service Napster was shut down after just two years, leaving a giant vacuum in the ever-expanding peer-to-peer file-sharing space....

For many female wrestlers, the toughest challenge is finding opponents.

Chained wives, violent rabbis, and one woman’s mission to infiltrate an Orthodox crime ring

Shenzhen flooded the world with cheap gadgets. Can it now become what Silicon Valley never did—a global hub of innovation, entrepreneurship, and manufacturing?

History makes no mention of what was one of the most popular all-female country acts ever. Yet the story of the Goree Girls—inmates who banded together in the forties at Texas’ sole penitentiary for women—is worth a listen.

Texas may have inspired Larry McMurtry to become a writer, but there is no writer who has inspired an understanding of Texas quite like Larry McMurtry. At age eighty, our most iconic author still has work to do.

A new short film captures some of Cohen’s reflections on creativity and spirituality, and on preparing for the end of life.

The island, in Siberia’s Lake Baikal, has no paved roads, herds of wild horses and a shamanistic religion. The 52 Places Traveler found his spirit animal there.

A wrenching decision to end life support, and the unthinkable mistake that devastated not one but two families.

John Mueller was the heir to one of the great Texas barbecue dynasties. Aaron Franklin was an unknown kid from College Station who worked his counter. John had it all and then threw it all away. Aaron came out of nowhere to create the state’s most coveted brisket. Then John rose from the ashes.

In 1961, Joachim Rudolph escaped from one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. A few months later, he began tunnelling his way back in. Why?

The grim traveler sampled the offerings with a heavy heart.

Liberty Reserve was like PayPal for the unbanked. Was it also a global money-laundering operation?

WhatsApp has proliferated in the highest echelons of the Afghan government — as well as among the Taliban.

The town hasn't yet become the promised global-trade nexus. Nonetheless the shopping zone has lured entrepreneurs hoping to get rich and shoppers trying to get a bargain.

This is the story of a little-known FBI forensics lab and how it changed the war on terror.

“Stimulating” it leads to calmness, but how and why?

Caltech professor Gregg Hallinan and his team are scanning the universe for possible Earths with cheap antennae built from parts found online, cake pans, and, yes, chicken wire—taking the lonely search for habitable planets and automating it.

Clumsy diplomacy, allegations of bribery, a stinging U.S. diplomatic loss, and China's ascension in the United Nations.

In a new memoir, the bassist describes how he expanded his consciousness, found his muse and landed in a storied rock band.

Forensic scientists, the police and crime scene investigators master horror with a steady hand. This article gives a rare insight into the post-mortem examination of a homicide.

Collecting seashells is as old as humanity. What we do with them can reveal who we are, where we’re from, and what we believe.

The retailer’s bankruptcy filing, and interviews with former employees, give a rare glimpse into a family controlled, intensely secretive operation.

The Reverend Charles Moore ardently dedicated his life to the service of God and his fellow man. But when he couldn’t shake the thought that he hadn’t done enough, he drove to a desolate parking lot in his hometown of Grand Saline for one final act of faith.

The untold story of how digital detectives unraveled the mystery of Olympic Destroyer—and why the next big cyberattack will be even harder to crack.

In suburban Fort Worth the frail psyche of a football prodigy collided with the crazed ambition of his dad, who himself had been a high school football star way back when. The consequences were deadly.

No one in McAllen saw Irene Garza leave Sacred Heart that night in 1960. The next morning, her car was still parked down the street from the church. She never came home.

Step into the private kitchens of Basque country’s sociedades gastronómicas, where everything revolves around food

Twenty years ago my hometown made national headlines when the local college staged an internationally acclaimed play about gay men and the AIDS crisis. The people I grew up with are still feeling the aftershocks.

Not many people will drive the mail to places the U.S. Postal Service won’t. Seventy-one-year-old Gilbert Lujan is one of them.

The death of his life-long skateboarding friend prompts Aaron Gilbreath to get back on his board — at 44, with his toddler daughter in tow.

How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world

In 1942, a volley of torpedoes sent the U.S.S. Wasp to the bottom of the Pacific. For decades, the families of the dead wondered where in the lightless depths of the ocean the ship could possibly be. Earlier this year, a team of wreck hunters set out to find it.

Being ‘good’ need not take years of ethical analysis: just a few moments of gratitude can set you on the path to virtue

‘Each box was like the distillation of all that we have learned as a species about our bodies and their infirmities, a time capsule of medicine.’

Covering Texas news, politics, food, history, travel, crime, music, and everything in between for fifty years.

The subprime lending giant is a textbook case in creating a corporate culture of denial.

"She's missing. I’m not going to quit her."

Company in old age versus the pressure of conversation.

Three decades ago, a young man murdered his girlfriend and killed himself. What happened next to his heart was extraordinary.

So many Indian farmers are killing themselves that bodies pile up at the end of one long canal. Gurbaksh Singh helps their families find closure.

All you need is compassion and the courage to open your mouth

A survey of trepanation, or trephination, the oldest surgical procedure known to humanity.

Self-replicating, bacterial life first appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago. For most of Earth’s history, life remained at the single-celled level, and nothing like a nervous system existed …

[caption id="attachment_80535" align="aligncenter" width="576"] The Tahiti, seen here sailing on San Francisco Bay, was a 124-foot brigantine built by Tur...

The FAA conducted a safety review on the airport and found that pilots were mixing up two...

The long read: From bullying and sexual assault to squalid living conditions and forced labour, working at sea can be a grim business – and one deep-sea fishing fleet is particularly notorious

There is a “brain gain” afoot that suggests a national homecoming to less bustling spaces.

The 18th century misadventures of HMS Wager and her reluctant crew

In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home.

Former Gov. Steve Beshear’s administration was warned multiple times that its rural broadband bet wouldn’t get certain federal funds. Meet the officials and conflicted consultants who didn’t listen and doomed the plan.

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska—be it a sea otter, polar bear, or humpback whale—veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call. Her necropsies reveal cause of death and causes for concern as climate change frees up new pathogens and other dangers in a vast, thawing north.

Delicate and impossible to replicate, su filindeu (or the “threads of God”) is a pasta made of hundreds of tiny strands by a single woman in a hillside town in Sardinia. She’ll make it for you too—if you’re willing to walk 20 miles overnight

Environmental and personal fallout from the Fukushima disaster continues nearly a decade later.

Behind the scenes at this year's Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the most prestigious car show in the world.

When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?

A Dutch gallerist made thousands of forgeries and passed them off as the work of real artists. When he was caught, a new con began.

Eric Klinenberg is the author of a book called Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. The phrase “palaces for the people” actually comes from Andrew Carnegie who was known as a titan of the Gilded Age and one of the wealthiest people in

When desperate storeowners want to convince passersby to stop in, they hire fun, happy people to pose as shoppers. They’re actually out-of-work actors, retirees, and me.

The modern version of the toy is practically unrecognizable, an Object Lesson.

Omar Salgado defied the odds in Room 20. But his is not a story about a miracle — it’s a story about medicine’s inability to accurately diagnose consciousness.

Alexander the Great’s death is an unsolved mystery. Was he a victim of natural causes, felled by some kind of fever, or did his marshals assas­sinate him, angered by his tyrannical ways? An autopsy…

In 2008, a federally owned power plant spewed coal sludge over 300 acres in Tennessee. Now, 40 people who helped clean up the mess are dead and 300 ill.

Grant Hadwin got a chainsaw and did something terrible.

Joe Ford, car detective, searches the world for stolen rare automobiles on the black market. The case he’s on now could set him up for life—if he’s not outsmarted by a skilled network of criminals and cheats.

Two decades after Rudy Giuliani tried to rid New York City of graffiti, the art form is flourishing—with unexpected consequences.

StockX is one of several online marketplaces that have turned resales of shoes into a big — and highly valued — business.

He ushered symmetry into theoretical physics, then vanished without a trace.

After nearly dying while filming “The Wizard of Oz,” Margaret Hamilton spent the rest of her career trying to escape her evil character’s long shadow.

Hundreds of skeletons are scattered around a site high in the Himalayas, and a new study overturns a leading theory about how they got there.

Stegosaur expert Susie Maidment is laying crucial groundwork for assigning ages to fossils from North America’s most dinosaur-rich rocks. More precise timings promise to reveal plenty about how the beasts lived and evolved through time.

A human-rights icon’s fall from grace in Myanmar

These desert libraries have been around for centuries and they hold sacred texts from ancient times.

Wild mustang populations are out of control, competing with cattle and native wildlife for resources. If the federal government doesn’t rein them in, ranchers may take matters into their own hands.

This quixotic colonial barrier was meant to enforce taxes.

The inside story of a Texas gun-smuggling ring.

Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries.

You’ve never heard of her, but somewhere in America, a top-secret investigator known as the Savant is infiltrating online hate groups to take down the most violent men in the country.

A fundamental understanding of what pain is continues to evade scientists.

After a decade, Peter Woit still thinks string theory is a gory mess.

After a chunk of his brain was removed, guitarist Pat Martino got his groove back.

Go behind the scenes at the South Carolina Aquarium's Sea Turtle Care Center during a nearly yearlong journey to get a massive injured loggerhead back home

Finding out his name turned out to be the easy part. The tough part was navigating the blurred lines that separate consciousness from unconsciousness — and figuring out whether his smile was really a smile.

As a cuke deckhand, your job first and foremost consists of making sure your diver survives

A rodeo cowboy, skydiver, firefighter, ultramarathoner and motorcycle racer, Coach Stroud is a 71-year-old badass. And he’s determined to die on his own terms.

On August 23rd, the day after Dietrich von Choltitz dispatched Rolf Nordling to contact the Allies, Hitler sent a message to Field Marshal Walther Model and von Choltitz demanding that Paris be hel…

Last winter, Moroccan officials found two hikers dead on the trail to the highest peak in the Atlas Mountains. The international investigation that followed revealed the fragility of the adventure travel economy, as well as what happens when a small tourist hub is suddenly made strange by violence.

From celebrity seating warfare to dogs sipping Champagne, there’s never a dull moment at America’s most famous sushi joint.

Few embodied the spirit of New Orleans, or helped take its music to strange new places, the way the man born Mac Rebennack did.

Nomads have been central to the country’s history for centuries. Anthony Sattin joins the roaming empire

The Charleston Gazette-Mail, known for its dogged accountability journalism, survived a merger and bankruptcy. Will it survive a new owner with ties to the very industries its reporters have been watchdogging?

How Stan Smith went from a "decent" tennis player to the most popular trainer on the planet

"The Mob was an integral part of everything." - Comedian Jackie Curtiss "I worked for a lot of gentlemen of that persuasion over the years. I learned a long time ago when I worked for Frank Costello in New York...

A peek at the scientists who chemically engineer the scents behind numerous commercial products.

With a new gene therapy center almost completed, the medical center is providing hope for families who previously had little.

Elementary, my dear Sherlock: it’s moral failure to see people as objects to be studied or as evidence to be interpreted

The vast majority of people in antiquity were too poor to leave many artifacts behind. But archaeologists have learned how to look beyond the temples and palaces.

The Russian ship called the Ivan Vassili began its life in St. Petersburg in 1897, where it was built as a civilian steam

In Ireland, few things are black and white, especially the law—and the tales of men who break it to dive for treasure under cover of darkness

A short story by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

A tour of a graveyard for beloved animals.

A detective’s quest reveals how one idealistic fisheries observer may have collided with criminals and desperate migrants—and paid for it with his life.

From 1993: The magician’s deft illusions flout reality, and he rejects the notion that magic is a suitable entertainment for children.

Technology can displace the cow and save the climate. But we will need to think beyond the bun

As a struggling grad student, I happened upon a lucrative side hustle with an elite team of card-counters—and found the community I'd been looking for.

First he found God. Then he found death metal. But Father Robert Culat believes there’s no reason the two can’t co-exist.

Baruch Vega ran a scheme that ensnared Colombian cocaine kingpins and gave him a life of luxury. Then one put a price on his head.

Humans and other mammals and birds would have been killed many times over by Chernobyl's radiation that plants in the most contaminated areas received. So why is plant life so resilient to radiation and nuclear disaster?

A story of lifelong grudges, frame-ups, greed, drugs, and an incompetent conspiracy of off-duty cops.

Six young men set out on a dead-calm sea to seek their fortunes. Suddenly they were hit by the worst gale in a century, and there wasn’t even time to shout. The article that eventually became The Perfect Storm.

Development of hypersonics is moving so quickly that it threatens to outpace any real discussion about the potential perils of such weapons, including how they may disrupt efforts to avoid accidental conflict, especially during crises.

"A sweatshop in America"

Discover extraordinary true stories celebrating the diversity of humanity. Click to read Narratively, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Mac Rebennack devoted himself to New Orleans culture.

Leadership Now is a leading source for leadership development and analysis. We believe that anyone can make a difference by leading from where they are.

The true story of how the City of London invented offshore banking – and set the rich free

The legend of the Sourtoe Cocktail continues.

Mathematical insights into how RNA helps viruses pull together their protein shells could guide future studies of viral behavior and function.

A map of over 18,000 asteroids in the Solar System.

How a brilliant scientist went from discovering a mother lode of treasure at the bottom of the sea to fleeing from authorities with suitcases full of cash.

Find out more about the shows on Sky HISTORY's TV channel, with plenty to read and watch on your favourite historical topics.

In an isolated Northern California community, the last remnants of the counterculture are confronting the future of cannabis.

From refrigerators to cars to Air Force One, Raymond Loewy's distinctive "cleanlining" sold products

A researcher who works through painting tells her story.

Jim Allison is an iconoclastic scientist who toiled in obscurity for years. Then he helped crack a mystery that may save millions of lives: Why doesn’t the immune system attack cancer?

The Oman Desert Marathon was my first ultra marathon. It was just over 100 miles (165km) across the baking sand. I didn’t really want to do it. It only came up as an idea when an editor from The Fi…

Bennington College in the 1980s was a hothouse of sex, drugs, and future literary stars--among them, Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem. Return to a campus and an era like no other.

Klamath County, Oregon, is the perfect place to go if you don't want to be found—and the worst place to be if someone threatens your life.

As China tightens its hold on Hong Kong, battles flare over identity and the special status of the former British colony.

He was falsely cast as Mozart’s murderer and music’s sorest loser. Now he’s getting a fresh hearing.

The inside story of an improbable team of divers, a near-impossible plan and the rescue of a Thai junior football team from a cave in Thailand

A young Englishman got mixed up in a white-supremacist movement. Then he learned of a plot to kill a politician.

When you live with animals, you collect killing stories.

Thirty-two-year-old French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts.

Follow my adventures on Instagram! http://instagram.com/Jeffrey.hk Dropped new timelapse! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JBMpzW_B58 Hi all, i built a 24K resolution 360 camera specifically for upcoming 360 timelapse project. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fseH9Kd5ooM If you'd like to support my camera work so I can continue timelapse (this piece used up more than half of my D750 Shutter Life. Rain and camera also don't get along) please check out my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/YTJeffHK 30 Days of Timelapse, about 80,000 photos combined. 1500GB of Project files. Sailing in the open ocean is a unique feeling and experience.I hope to capture and share it for everyone to see. Support my photo/videography by buying through my affiliate links! Best Value Fullframe for timelapse https://amzn.to/2MYk2vX Fisheye lens used in 30 days timelapse https://amzn.to/30uE4Aw 360 camera I use https://amzn.to/2Qfgcku Drone https://amzn.to/2Qhxk98 BIG JUICE powerbank for everything https://amzn.to/304fKJq Gaffer Tape (no residue) https://amzn.to/2LCRLYq Silica Gel Packs https://amzn.to/2N083xJ Good intervalometer https://amzn.to/2N1ETOS Good Entry Tripod https://amzn.to/2ZWp8e7 Pro Tripod https://amzn.to/2NYSlCH Budget Time lapse Motion Control https://amzn.to/2A4H7Vd Advance time lapse Motion control https://amzn.to/2PQ5ctn Route was from Red Sea -- Gulf of Aden -- Indian Ocean -- Colombo -- Malacca Strait -- Singapore -- South East China Sea -- Hong Kong Camera used: D750, Rokinon 12mm f/2.8 0:32 Milky Way 0:53 Sirius Star (I think) Correction: Jupiter the planet according to some viewers 1:17 Approaching Port of Colombo 1:45 Cargo Operation 2:08 Departure Colombo with Rainstorm 2:29 Beautiful Sunrise 3:13 Lightning Storm at Malacca Strait and Singapore Strait 3:29 Clear night sky Milky Way with lightning storm 4:01 Camera getting soaked 5:09 Arrival Singapore 5:56 Departure Singapore 6:20 Moon-lit night sky 6:48 Another Sunrise 8:30 Headed due north and you can see Ursa Major rotating neatly around Polaris. 8:36 Squid Boats 8:54 Chaotic Traffic 9:15 Arrival Hong Kong Music: Philip G Anderson - Winter (from 0:00 to 4:37 and 8:00 to 10:00) Buy Winter here: https://philipganderson.bandcamp.com/album/winter Stellardrone - Billions And Billions (from 4:37 to 8:00) =====10 Reasons Why Maritime is AWESOME ===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U18AHZbS_M =====10 Reasons Why Maritime SUCKS ===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMYEKwxTyo =====How To Anchor a Mega-Ship ===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62O7KYfb4GA =====Where did I go last 2 months?? Cancun Adventure====== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsizwRUXoa0 =====Navigation Bridge of a Mega Ship===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj3_peT4u9M =====A Tour of Mega Ship's Engine Room===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7BhBsVigZw =====HEAVY SEAS! Bad Weather in Atlantic Ocean===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZA6gNeZ5G4 =====Cargo Operations on Ship===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj7ixi2lqF4 =====Top 6 Questions about Merchant Marine===== https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBpQ9Y4jEfg

Founded in 1926 by Russian socialists, Workers Tavern is the perfect place to win bratwursts and talk to whiskey-swilling grandmas.

Checkout one of the oldest terrarium gardens in the world! Read the story of David Latimer's sealed bottle ecosystem from the 1960's.

When Renaissance explorers went north, they found a lunar landscape here on earth.

One of China’s great beauties, Chen Yuanyuan was born to a peasant family, orphaned and sold as a prostitute, later becoming the consort of general and despised traitor, Wu Sangui. What eventually became of her was never known, until now.

Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I became the youngest person and first woman ever to win the Mongol Derby. What made me so sure I was ready, when I was totally unprepared?

A dark journey Into the world of a man gone wild.

On the revolutionaries, highly-paid negotiators, former spies, foreign businessmen and their families, who all played roles in the massive Colombian kidnap and ransom industry during its 1990s heyday.

The author works a 20-hour shift, loves chocolate, and writes best in her cashmere nightgown.

The International Spy Museum details the audacious plan that involved a reclusive billionaire, a 618-foot-long ship, and a great deal of stealth

A nurse, Niels Högel, admitted to dozens of murders but might have killed as many as 300 patients. So what prevented colleagues from stopping one of the world’s deadliest serial killers?

As the natural resources that gave rise to heavy industries in China’s northeast run dry, the cities that developed around coal mines are struggling to modernise.

During a month hiking Muir's "Range of Light," three young women traversed snowy mountain passes, ran out of food, confronted a gendered wilderness, and learned to deal with each other.

Abandoned in the Arctic for seven decades, the last remaining Lend-Lease Douglas airplane in Russia is museum-bound, at a time of tensions with the United States.

He spent years scrimping and saving. But without a will, where’s his money going?

They've spent 8,000 hours searching for Sam Sayers.

When a secretive private equity firm bought Remington, sales were strong and the future bright. A decade later, the company couldn’t escape its debts.

As the son of African immigrants, Antetokounmpo was unwelcome in Athens. Then he showed promise as a basketball star.

These entrepreneurs are playing with fire.

Kathi Lynn Austin is on a global chase to stop the flow of guns threatening to wipe the rhinoceros off the face of the Earth.

One man wanted to change the raisin industry for the better. He got more than he bargained for.

After multiple rare cancers have been diagnosed in Waycross, Georgia, the city grapples with a profound question: What if the industries that gave us life are killing us?

Surviving seventh grade with a practically perfect punk nanny.

The unsung heroes of the food world battle against time and chaos, cooking haute cuisine over lit cans of Sterno in the gloomy back hallways of New York's civic landmarks.

The punishing Hahnenkamm downhill brings street-party revelry to a medieval town in the Tyrolean Alps, Nick Paumgarten writes.

A photo essay of delight and despair

Tracing the origins of humanity in the Alaskan wilderness.