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…
"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.
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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.
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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.
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One cunning business maneuver created a tradition and saved a franchise.
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Both I and my research have been deeply affected by a polar bear I have never met face to face.
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“It was the most fragile object we have ever encountered.”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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…
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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.
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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.
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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.