Peggy Jo Tallas spent most of her adult life doing two things: taking care of her ailing mother and robbing bank after bank dressed as a pudgy, bearded cowboy.

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran. The declassified story that became Ben Affleck’s Argo.

What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.

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.

“I went on a lesbian cruise and it blew up my entire life.”

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

The writer on his father’s religious devotion to personal style. Among the maxims: “the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”; “there is nothing like a fresh burn”; and “always wear white to the face.”

Carried away by love—for risk and for each other—two of the world’s best freedivers went to the limits of their sport. Only one came back.

A two-part series on America’s role in the Syrian civil war.

On October 17, 1973, John McClamrock was paralyzed playing high school football. Doctors doubted he would make it through the night. But he and his mother refused to give up—for more than three decades.

A youth wasted on pro-level ultimate frisbee.

Young immigrants who have been separated from their parents find a home at the Children’s Center.

“Incels” are going under the knife to reshape their faces, and their dating prospects.

Following fallen soldier Joe Montgomery from field to grave.

A profile of a 25-year-old Spanish sensation.

Despite what dementia has stolen from the cerebral creator of Deadwood, it has given his work a new sense of urgency.

She moved to Cape Cod to escape the glitzy Manhattan world she born into. The only witness to her murder was her 2-year-old daughter. Everyone she knew, it seemed, was a suspect.

The case against “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri was without a country, a family or a home. Then he landed at Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The article that inspired The Terminal.

“This baby was unviable, basically. That’s what they say. They say that the baby is ‘incompatible with life.’”

Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

In 1936, Karp Lykov whisked his family into the Siberian wilderness to escape Bolshevik persecution. They remained there, alone, until discovered by a helicopter crew in 1978.

Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of her gravely ill child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.

On the curious life of Archibald Butt, confidant to President Taft and tragic victim of the sinking Titanic.

As much as the narrative of Butt’s heroism meant to the family, to the White House, to the military, it seems all too cinematic. The reality is that the experience was probably a great annoyance to him, right up until the moment it became a nightmare.