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.

When a rash of sensational museum robberies stunned Europe, police zeroed in on a fearsome crime family—and a flashy new generation of young outlaws.

Their boat gone, they spent five days in the Atlantic Ocean without food or water, surrounded by sharks.

Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?

Inside the political battle over reproductive rights in Texas a decade ago.

Awash in coders, crypto, and capital, the city is loving—and beginning to shape—its newest industry.

393 Powell Street was a peaceful home until residents started dying in brutal, mysterious ways.

Since she first started working in the hospitality industry two decades ago, Vida Afram has cleaned nearly 60,000 hotel rooms.

How online sales of highly regulated, super-toxic rodenticides exploit gaps in the law and imperil wildlife.

“In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He’s feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.”

On the Red Sox’s historic implosion:

Drinking beer in the Sox clubhouse is permissible. So is ordering take-out chicken and biscuits. Playing video games on one of the clubhouse’s flat-screen televisions is OK, too. But for the Sox pitching trio to do all three during games, rather than show solidarity with their teammates in the dugout, violated an unwritten rule that players support each other, especially in times of crisis.

The story of a sheriff’s deputy in Minnesota who took his own life.

"If anything happens to me," Ruettimann said, "give this to the reporter." After Ruettimann's death, Hereaux took the file down off his desk. Inside was a thick stack of loose-leaf documents, a manila folder stuffed with letters, and a catalog-size clasp envelope labeled "Reports." Written in black permanent marker in the margin of the envelope was the reporter's name: mine.

An essay on working at Sotheby’s.

Art pricing is not absolute magic; there are certain rules, which to an outsider can sound parodic. Paintings with red in them usually sell for more than paintings without red in them. Warhol’s women are worth more, on average, than Warhol’s men. The reason for this is a rhetorical question, asked in a smooth continental accent: “Who would want the face of some man on their wall?”

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

On a basketball coach starting over at the lowest levels of the game after his ascendant NCAA career ended in a hazy tabloid scene at a Cleveland crackhouse.

The story of Max Factor, a Polish immigrant who revoltuionized Hollywood cosmetics starting in the 1920s, and his “Beauty Calibrator” machine.

What led to the death of a 5-year-old boy, “the Everychild in the state system.”

A final visit with late boxer Teófilo Stevenson, who could have fought or even been Muhammad Ali had he not stayed in Cuba.

Untangling the aftermath of a United States drone strike in Yemen.

A profile of the highest-paid female executive in America, who was born male.

The profile of a 34-year-old woman named Charity Johnson who tricked people all over the country into believing she was still in high school.

The writer is reluctantly whisked away to to a small house in upstate New York to attend an ayhuasca ceremony with six strangers.

Monaco’s richest woman was shot in ambush outside a hospital. Her heirs stand to inherit over a billion dollars each.